Sirigu is a little village in Ghanaian Northern Plains.
Sirigu a scenic village in the Upper East Region of Ghana, in a fairy-tale savannah landscape with beautiful, typical Northern traditionally decorated houses, trees, and farmlands.
The people of Sirigu are mostly farmers, growing sorghum, millet, groundnut and keeping cattle, goats and fowl and livestock. Several years of intensive farming and poor rainfall has degraded the land to the extent that even subsistence farming in threatened. This is made worse by low prices of farm produce and unreliable rains.
Sirigu is well known for its basketry, pottery, traditional architecture, and wall paintings. Many children owe their education and healthcare to income generated from the handicraft and traditional arts produced by the women of Sirigu. Consequent decline of yields form farm has made it even more urgent to revive these artforms and to leverage it as an important source of income for the women for the upkeep of their families. As stated above women are mostly involve in the making of the artworks, hence SWOPA (Sirigu Women Organization for Pottery and Art).
Women in Sirigu are socially and economically disadvantaged in the community due to the largely male-dominated traditional system; the have a low literacy rate and have to combine household chores with the heavy farming workload. Pottery-making, basketry, wall-painting and canvass painting therefore provide the only means for them to earn their own income and also serve as a platform to develop and express their age old individual potentials and identity.