Today we share the second of six pieces of public writing selected for publication from an assignment in ENGL 801 “Graduate Studies in English”: a piece of public scholarship (700-1,000 words) which tailors an academic paper and its scholarly intervention of 10-12 pages for a general-interest audience.
Read more about the assignment and the first publication, “Who is Writing?” by Mizanul Bari (MA ’27), in the post from December 11. Now, on to “Localization: Some Local Nonpharmaceutical Interventions During the COVID-19 Pandemic in Ghana” by Daniel Effah (MA ’27)!
— Karin Westman, Professor and Department Head / Instructor for ENGL 801 B/ZA (Fall 2025)
If the COVID-19 taught the world two lessons, it is that no two people—no, no two peoples—respond to crisis the same way, and that localization is an existential need.
I define localization as a situation where people respond to or do things in a way befitting of their way of living. See, “blindly” parachuting in solutions from places such as the United States directly into Ghana would have done more harm than good, because Ghanaians’ gregarious way of life makes isolation-centered solutions impractical. That is not to say that social distancing played no role at all in Ghana’s fight against the virus. Anyone who makes such a claim would simply be pushing a half-truth. But to suggest that Ghana dealt with the virus exclusively — or even mainly — through isolation-centered solutions would not be any closer to the truth either.
So how, then, did Ghana fight the COVID-19 pandemic?
Well, as a Ghanaian who lived in Ghana during the COVID-19 period, it is painful to have to announce the glaring truth after so long a time that Ghana could simply not have contained the virus — not as expediently as it did — without the dexterous ingenuity of its locals expressed through the reinvention and / or adoption of the Veronica Bucket, the African Print nose mask, and the alcohol-based hand sanitizer. I will illustrate why that is the case in the next few paragraphs. Before that, however, I would like to clarify that I am, by no means, through this rhetoric undermining the significance of the prudent measures taken by the government of Ghana when the virus reared its head (Sibiri et al., 2020). And, if democracy is defined as, to borrow Abraham Lincoln’s famous quote, “a government of the people, by the people, and for the people,” then we owe the government as much appreciation (as we do the people of Ghana) for encouraging local ingenuity.
The Ghanaian social world is built through movement and interaction. In that world of intimate contact, where haggling in markets brings faces close to one another and where women gather at garbage sites to sweep, scrub, and joke their way through cleaning tasks, a virus carried by touch or exhaled breath finds fertile ground. The Veronica Bucket, its name derived from Veronica Bekoe, its Ghanaian inventor (Oninku, 2021), emerged as a guard placed at gates, doors, and open spaces to interrupt that natural flow of contact. The bucket, fitted with a tap and placed high on a stand, created a neat route for water to flow onto palms before draining into a basin. Shops placed it at their entrance and instructed every customer to wash hands before crossing the threshold. Churches placed it beside ushers who stood and waited for congregants to clean their hands before entering crowded sanctuaries where singing and prayer filled the air. Schools placed it on dusty compounds where children gathered in large numbers, and lorry stations placed it beside ticket tables where passengers waited to fill seats on buses that traditionally pressed four grown adults onto a row clearly too small for comfort. In each space, the bucket drew a line that separated the outside, which held a greater risk of contamination, from the inside, which communities attempted to keep protected through simple, deliberate cleansing.
The communal force that defines the Ghanaian social world emerges through fashion, too. The Ghanaian tailor has always worked with wax print cloth whose colors and patterns speak to identity, family ties, status and occasion. The cloth carries meanings embedded in church gatherings, weddings, funerals, festivals and ancestral remembrance. When tailors turned cloth into nose masks, they drew upon that heavy cultural history and created an item that the Ghanaian embraced readily. The cloth itself softened the fear that often surrounded masks imported from abroad and made the protective item familiar rather than foreign. The color and texture made the mask easy to accept because it echoed what the Ghanaian already wore to social events. The connection between the culture and the cloth mattered because Ghanaian social life is expressive, colorful, and vibrant, and any tool meant to regulate that life must align with the aesthetic sense of the community. The African print mask fit that demand, which allowed it to enter every corner of Ghanaian society with little resistance. Women walking to market wore masks that matched their dresses. Men attending funerals selected masks with sober tones. Traders wore masks that complemented their wax print cloth wraps, and children tied small pieces over their faces as they hurried to school.
The alcohol-based hand sanitizers, locally produced, also bridged the gap created by the speed at which the virus spread relative to the speed at which imported medical supplies could reach the country. Ghana could not rely heavily on external goods because supply chains were strained worldwide, and so the country depended on the talent of its people. Additionally, because of the high demand, foreign-produced hand sanitizers were selling as high as seventy (70) cedis per small bottle during the few months of the pandemic. The alcohol-based hand sanitizers, quite affordable (selling at 10 Ghana cedis per big bottle on average), cured a daunting economic problem since the virus did not discriminate between those who could or could not afford the hand sanitizer. The hand sanitizers also echoed the older tradition of using local herbs and remedies to fight malaria, measles, chicken pox, and cholera, diseases that had long challenged the people of Ghana. Just as Ghanaian communities had crafted remedies in the past from the natural environment surrounding them, they now prepared sanitizers that met the demands of a modern crisis.
And there it is. If the COVID-19 pandemic taught the people of Ghana one lesson, it would be this: the fight against the virus was possible — seamless, even — because of localization.
Works Cited
Emmanuel, Attramah. “Community Health Officer Gertrude Doku Washes Her Hands before Attending to a Patient.” PMI Impact Malaria, Digital Image, 28 Oct. 2020, impactmalaria.org/news-and-blog/posts/pre-pandemic-malaria-training-in-ghana-proves-advantageous. Accessed 4 Dec. 2025.
Oninku, Eugene Ablade. “The ‘Veronica Bucket’ and the Inventive Step Requirement under the Patent Law of Ghana.” UCC Law Journal, vol. 1, no. 2, Dec. 2021, pp. 395–418, https://doi.org/10.47963/ucclj.v1i2.425. Accessed 16 Dec. 2025.
Sibiri, Hagan, et al. “Containing the Impact of COVID-19: Review of Ghana’s Response Approach.” Health Policy and Technology, vol. 10, no. 1, Nov. 2020, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.hlpt.2020.10.015. Accessed 17 Nov. 2025.
— Daniel Effah (MA ’27)
K-State English 
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