Keta Global Slavery Summit

Personal contact to higher educational institution faculty, staff , historians and anti-slavery experts in order to enlist them for the non-profit Freedom University Pioneer program, was met not only with a high level of interest, but also repeated demand for an extended, Aspen-like summer conference, to enable them to participate in social activist projects. The high level of interest is attributable to the originality and pragmatic nature of our programs, and in particular, to the Keta University Advisory Board, a pre-eminent body in Slave Coast history and Science.

• See: http://freedomghana.org/freedom-university-advisory-board/

This concept has now been embodied in a conference known as the Keta Global Slavery Summit, to be held at Keta, Ghana. Eminent participants, scholars, Strategic Partners, national ministries and international media are among those who have already declared their intention to attend. Countries represented, to date, include the USA, UK, South Africa, British West Indies, Ghana, Benin, Canada, and Israel. Others are expected.

• See Pioneer program: http://freedomghana.org/freedom-corps-ghana-fcg-programme/

With this need in mind, we are organizing a landmark three week conference in Ghana, the Keta Global Slavery Summit, from July 1 – 20, 2016. This summit will serve as the first-ever colloquium to blend scholarship and social activism to combat modern slavery. We will explore pragmatic solutions for attacking fundamental factors in the development and propagation of slavery: ignorance, poverty, lack of opportunity, intolerance and greed. For the first time, scholarship will be joined with social activism to examine the pathological histology of modern slavery, and attack it through science, commerce, education, technology and other weapons at our disposal.

The setting will be Freedom Campus, located next to the infamous slave dungeon and shipping port, Fort Prinzenstein. This offers a degree of historical immediacy and poignancy that can never be emulated elsewhere.

Members of our unequaled Advisory Board and other distinguished experts, will present papers on a range of burning topics, including child slavery, Eastern European prostitution, work bondage, the Black Jews of Ghana, the West Indian economic model to improve an impoverished people’s standard of living, gender equality, the roles of nutrition and health in promoting shared wealth, and much more.

We seek reasonable short and long-term solutions to emerge from the collective efforts of the participants, with concrete, detailed and achievable plans of how each will be financed.

The three-week summit is broken down into 1-week themes as follows:

• Week I – Will feature one day of talks and discussions on advances in harvesting, processing and storage of crops, and better utilization of indigenous food stuffs. A second full day will be dedicated to construction, building materials and state-of-the-art solutions in affordable/residential housing, and government sector institutional and commercial construction solutions.

• Week II – Offers two subjects (one day each): Science and Technology; and Communications/IT.

• Week III – Features two one day presentations and discussions. The first addresses the prevention of malaria and a range of vector-borne diseases through tested new scientific solutions; the second, the vital importance of correct nutrition in disease prevention and good health

Each session is open to all summit participants and will be attended by experts from the relevant fields, as well as government, NGOs, and the private sector. This is a fully pragmatic exercise, one that engages the best minds that we can bring to bear on problems and opportunities in Ghana, and to some extent, Africa as a whole.

Much like a stone cast in a pond, each participant becomes a new, informed activist-ripple imparting their knowledge and our influence when they return to their communities.