History of the Peace Corps in Guinea
From Peace Corps Wiki
Peace Corps signed a cooperation agreement with the government of Guinea in 1962, which forms the basis for our current country program. The first Volunteers arrived in Guinea in 1963. However, in 1966, relations between the United States government and the government of Guinea soured, and the Guinean government asked Volunteers to leave. Peace Corps was invited back in 1969, but again relations between the two governments deteriorated, and Volunteers left in 1971. Soon after President Sekou Touré’s death in 1984, Peace Corps was asked to return once again to Guinea.
History and Future of Peace Corps Programming in Guinea
The mission of the Peace Corps in Guinea is to help the people of Guinea meet their development and human resource needs. Existing projects address the top development priorities of the government, which are: education, health, natural resource management and small enterprise development. Most Volunteers are based in rural areas so that they may reach those communities most in need of assistance.
Since 1963, more than 1,100 Volunteers have served in Guinea. Currently, approximately 115 Volunteers serve in-country. No matter what sector they are in, Volunteers are much in demand by schools, health centers, cooperatives, and rural communities; requests for Volunteers historically exceed our capacity to provide them.
The development philosophy of Peace Corps/Guinea is to build capacity from the ground up—to empower people so they can improve the quality of their own lives. This philosophy has an impact not only on the education, health, and economics of the people in communities where Volunteers work, but also on their view of the role of private citizens in a democracy such as ours, and this fosters an appreciation for honest, transparent and democratic institutions and governance.
The future for Peace Corps/Guinea looks good, and we envision changes that will make it even better. Because the government of Guinea is unable to recruit sufficient numbers of teachers to meet the needs of rural schools, Peace Corps/ Guinea continues to supply high school classroom teachers. We hope to move to the next level of capacity building and train teachers themselves. There also appear to be opportunities to work in new regions of Guinea, and Peace Corps staff members are currently evaluating re-entry to the Forest region.