When Jordyn Maywood visited the Berekusu Health Center, she didn’t expect how much it would change the way she thinks about her own field. At the Health Center, she observed first-hand how patients were dealing with water-related illnesses. “I saw how important it is to connect classroom learning with community engagement,” shared Maywood, a Biomedical Engineering student from the University of Waterloo. “The visit allowed me to better understand how what we learn in the classroom actually affects people’s lives.”
Maywood was one of twelve students who spent a month at Ashesi University this year as part of a collaborative field course with the University of Waterloo, now in its second year. Made possible by the generosity of David and Linda Archer Cornfield and supported by Ashesi Foundation Canada, the course immersed students in Ghana’s Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) landscape; from community health centers to national infrastructure.
Through partnerships with WaterAidGhana, WASHKING, Aquaya, CEWEFIA, the Accra School of Hygiene and the Ghana Water Company Limited, students examined the environmental and public health pressures shaping water access across the country. They engaged directly with practitioners, challenged their assumptions, and began reflecting on solutions.
The insights from these visits carried into their work with Ashesi’s International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) team. Focused on the informal e-waste recycling hub at Agbogbloshie, a suburb of Accra where open burning of electronics exposes residents to toxic chemicals, the team is researching synthetic biology as a cleaner method of extracting valuable metals like gold from electronic waste.
In a post on LinkedIn, Carol Liberty, an Environment and Business student from Waterloo, described the experiences as the “most formative” of her degree. On the iGEM Project, she contributed a PESTLE and SWOT analysis, while others in the visiting group developed a policy brief documenting the health, environmental, and socio-economic costs of current recycling practices.
“The frameworks I had studied looked different when applied across cultural contexts,” Liberty explained. “The addition of ethics as a standalone dimension of analysis, something I had never encountered in years of business coursework, reframed how I think about responsible consulting and cross-cultural collaboration entirely.”
Taken together, the experiences left Liberty with a conviction she carried home: “Problems do not disappear; they shift into other forms. The people absorbing those shifts most heavily are most often the ones excluded from the rooms where solutions are designed. True sustainability requires not just interdisciplinary thinking and systems approaches, but the humility to recognize whose knowledge and whose burden we are too often overlooking.”
