By Kristin Johnson

At the beginning of 2014 Global Mamas made a new year’s resolution:

This will be the year that the Mamas set and achieve longer-term goals.

Long-term planning does not come naturally in Ghana. The cultural norm is to focus on the short-term – plan for today to get to tomorrow. This short term focus makes sense when dealing with poverty, health care challenges, and the general instability of life in a developing nation. But even as the Mamas have begun to realize financial security through the steady orders provided by Global Mamas, they have still struggled to achieve the personal and business goals that require longer term planning.

Over the past decade, we have seen that the more successful a woman is, the more pressure she receives to help support her extended family and community with immediate needs. This drains her business and her bank account of the resources needed to achieve longer term personal and business goals. The one exception to this trend is how committed all of the Mamas are to investing in the education of their children, which definitely is a long-term goal. So even though it makes sense that the Mamas struggle with achieving their dreams that require longer-term planning, it doesn’t mean that we can’t try to shift the trend.

Using the SMART goal format to set appropriate goals.With the support of our talented volunteers, Patience and Anna Rose, managers of the Global Mamas capacity building program, developed and implemented a program focused on setting and achieving SMART goals. SMART refers not only to the fact that the Mamas are talented and intelligent individuals, but also that the goals are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time Sensitive. The key components of the program included:

• Bringing the women together in small groups so that they can support each other and hold each other accountable. Each small group has given themselves names like Glorious (shown above) and Arise & Shine.

• Developing a clear plan of shorter terms goals that would lead to the achievement of the big dream.

• Celebrating successes as they occurred along the way.

From the beginning we were amazed by the great response from the Mamas, who said they very much needed the morale support offered by the program to achieve their dreams. Forty of the Cape Coast Mamas are now actively engaged in the SMART goal program. Their goals include personal ones like sending their children for post-graduate education or buying land. Others have set business goals that include training new employees, purchasing an electric sewing machine or buying fabric in bulk to get better pricing. And one successful Mama has achieved her goal, which was to bring electricity to her house [in Ghana a home owner has to pay the electric company to connect their home to the grid]. For this Mama the process was so successful that she has set a new goal – to buy an electric sewing machine by June 2015. Based on its success, Global Mamas will continue the SMART goal program into 2015.