Investment also would mean Asene residents could repair and rebuild some local schools, which now have holes peppering their roofs, potholes in their classrooms and scuffed and marred chalkboards. Asene's residents must build their own clinics and schools because, at least in such remote areas, Ghana's government does not. From 1990 to 1994, health spending and education spending averaged 1.2 percent and 3.7 percent, respectively, of the country's gross domestic product. The result is that 149 of every 1,000 babies born in rural Ghana die before age 5. Rural immunization rates are only 39 percent.
Education is critical to foreign investors.
In Asia, manufacturing plants built by international investors such as Nike, Sony or Honda hire only workers with a high-school education. Asian countries have invested heavily in primary and secondary school education, creating a large potential work force for labor-intensive manufacturing plants. In Ghana, as in many other African countries, there is no critical mass of such workers. Those words ring hauntingly true for people like Nicholas Adjei, one of Ghana's millions of subsistence farmers, for whom the simplest dreams remain out of reach. He would like to educate his three children, buy a car, build a home.