People who've worked in Ghana

Alan joined the U.S. Peace Corps right out of Yale University in 1968, and taught in a rural secondary school in Half Assini, Ghana. He fell in love there with Francisca Mary Blay. After going back to business school in the U.S. for a few months in the U.S. in 1970, he decided that was not the life for him, and returned to Ghana to marry Mary there in 1971. He rejoined the Peace Corps for six more years in Ghana from 1972-78, working in teaching, publishing, rural business development, and agricultural communication. He returned to the U.S. from 1978-84 to study Development Support Communication, earning a Ph.D. in Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Iowa. He is known as a writer and communicator. His professional expertise is on the planning of innovations, and on communication support for their implementation. In his UNICEF career he worked in a wide range of areas including public health, education especially life-skills, social development linked to micro-credit initiatives, emergency planning, and HIV and AIDS. This began with consulting work for UNICEF in Nigeria in 1983, in the education sector, followed by a full-time appointment as project officer (ORT promotion) in October, 1984. His UNICEF career subsequently took him to Turkey (1988-93) as Health Program officer; Afghanistan (1993-95) as planning officer and acting program coordinator; China (1995-99) as senior program planning officer; and Swaziland (1999-2006) as Representative, where he led a reorientation of programming around HIV and AIDS issues, and a ten-fold expansion in funding. On retirement he moved back to Iowa City, Iowa, to pursue his aspirations as a writer. He has published children’s life-skills books and fables used in Swaziland’s schools and Sunday schools, and was the developer of “The String Game Story” HIV/AIDS communication tool which has been adopted for use in several countries, and adapted into other formats including radio soap opera, community drama, and film. He is currently involved in writing (essay/memoir, fiction and children’s literature), lecturing (he was the Governor’s U.N. Day Chair for Iowa in 2007, and will teach a course on “HIV Prevention Through the Arts” in 2008), and consulting. He is still in love and married with his Peace Corps sweetheart, Mary, who was well known in UNICEF, in her day, as a remarkable chef, and as a “two for the price of one” UNICEF Representative through her charity work and Women’s group activism on behalf of children in all the places where they worked. They have children and grandchildren in New York, Washington, Chicago, and Takoradi.

Yale University A.B. (1968) in English (emphasis creative writing).
University of Iowa Ph.D. (1984), Journalism and Mass Communication (emphasis Development Support Communication).