**Sirigu Women's Organisation of Pottery and Art (SWOPA)** is a celebrated community-based women's collective in Sirigu, a village in the Kassena-Nankana District of Ghana's Upper East Region — famous for its distinctive hand-built pottery and bold, geometric wall painting. SWOPA was founded in 1997 by **Melanie Kasise**, a Ghanaian woman who returned to her home area to organise the local women — who had long practised pottery and mural art as a domestic craft — into a formal, income-earning cooperative. What began with a handful of women has grown into an organisation of several hundred members, making it one of the most recognised women's art enterprises in northern Ghana. The two art forms at its heart are deeply traditional to the Kassena and Nankani peoples: - **Pottery** — hand-coiled, pit-fired pots, bowls and vessels made from local clay, used for storage, cooking and ritual, now also sold as decorative pieces. - **Wall painting (mural art)** — the striking black, white and red geometric patterns painted on the mud walls of traditional compounds. The designs are passed down through generations of women and carry symbolic meaning tied to Kassena-Nankana cosmology. SWOPA's compound in Sirigu doubles as a workshop, gallery and visitor centre, where tourists and researchers come to watch the women at work, buy directly from the makers, and learn the craft. The organisation also runs training in literacy, batik and other skills, and its earnings go straight to the women and their families — a practical model of women's empowerment in a part of Ghana where economic opportunities for rural women are limited. Culturally, SWOPA matters because it turned what was once undervalued "women's work" into a source of pride, cash income and international recognition — helping preserve Kassena-Nankana artistic heritage while giving its custodians a livelihood. It sits alongside other northern Ghana craft traditions (the basketry of Bolgatanga, the smocks of the Upper West) as a flagship of the region's creative economy. If you're planning to visit, Sirigu is roughly 30–40 minutes by road from Bolgatanga, the Upper East regional capital, and the best time to see the mural painting at its freshest is just after the rainy season, when the women repaint the compound walls. As the Akan say, *"Onipa firi soro besi a, obesi onipa kurom"* — a person descends from the sky to settle in another's town; SWOPA is a fine example of women building their own town's name into the world.