In August 2026, Parents International returned to Ghana for three days of practical training with school owners, school leaders and our local partner, Parenting Education Network Ghana (PEN Ghana). This report captures not only what happened during the training, but how the programme was shaped by the people taking part.
Rather than relying on lectures or a fixed sequence of content, the facilitators set in motion group activities through which participants shared experiences, compared perspectives, identified challenges and selected the topics they considered most relevant. These priorities then shaped the parallel sessions on Day 2: advocacy and policy change, and critical thinking and information literacy.
The report follows some of the moments that made the training especially meaningful. Participants reworked school mission statements until they converged on two simple ideas: schools where every child is loved, and schools every child loves to attend. A spontaneous exercise in forming groups became a practical lesson in leadership. Work on cognitive bias revealed how difficult it can be to recognise confirmation bias in our own reasoning.
Digital access was not the challenge. Participants had universal access to devices and the internet, and instinctively turned to AI when looking for information and solutions. The more important question was how critically those outputs were checked, questioned and verified — making the information-literacy and critical-thinking elements developed through DRONE particularly relevant.
The advocacy group moved from distinguishing school-level problems from policy problems to mapping decision-makers, identifying those affected, defining a concrete policy change and building a shared advocacy campaign.
Throughout, the report also shows how research developed through EU-funded projects can become practical tools that are adapted to local realities rather than simply transferred from one context to another.
The final day shifted the focus to PEN Ghana and its own strategic priorities, reinforcing a core principle of the Training in Africa Programme: prepare carefully, listen closely, and create the conditions for people to build solutions that work in their own context.
More from Parents International
Real Partnership, Real Impact: Parents International Training in Ghana 2025
Training in Africa Programme: What We Learned in Ghana
DRONE’s Validation Workshop: Digital Literacy in Action
