JUKWA, Ghana -- A library being built near the trading center of this hamlet represents the kind of partnership President Barack Obama is urging Africans to cultivate not only with his administration, but with governments and development agencies around the world.

"Africa's future is up to Africans," Mr. Obama said in a speech Saturday that was hailed as an outline of a new paradigm in which the United States and other Western countries are partners, not patrons, of Africans. Residents of Jukwa, which is seated on a stretch of lush green plains some 10 miles inland from Cape Coast, are seeing the kind of partnership Mr. Obama talked about in their community.

It started in 2002, when the village in the Central Region of Ghana started receiving funding from the government to build the only library in a 17-village region of about 8,000 people.

They desperately need a library "because education is the bedrock of development," said Nana Yamoah, the chief of the Fante people of this area. "We need a library, a place where our young people can study and expand their knowledge."

But when Abraham Owusu Baidoo, the member of parliament who had secured funding for the construction, lost re-election in 2004, the funding was lost too.

"The government allocates 7¹/₂ percent of its income to district assemblies for development," Mr. Baidoo said, and because of the competitiveness of how funding is allocated, Jukwa's library, left without an advocate, languished unfunded.

It was resuscitated in 2005 when an international education and development program and West Virginia University partnered with a Ghanaian community service group to help the village complete the project on its own.

Eric Hartman, executive director of Amizade Global Service Learning, said the program sends college students to live and work in communities around the world for both cultural experience and college credit.

Amizade has two objectives, Mr. Hartman said: "To identify effective community organizations and leaders and support their efforts. And to also connect people across cultures through service."

At the moment, Amizade has a group of 12 students in Kayanga in northwest Tanzania. They are working with a community development organization to install sustainable water pumping systems for women.

In addition to providing manual labor, the students also teach, work in medical centers and do their own research on a range of topics. From public health issues such as malaria prevention and maternity health, to infrastructure issues such as access to water and microfinance and small business development, the objective is for the students to intertwine themselves in the fabric of village life.

In Jukwa, students started arriving in 2005, and Chris Nyame, director of Peace Humanity, the non-governmental organization that partnered with Amizade, said the stalled library project immediately got a much-needed boost.

"All of a sudden work started again because we had about 20 students who were here for a month working on the building," said Mr. Nyame, 55.

A social worker by training, Mr. Nyame said he has spent the past 20 years trying to build a community service network in Ghana.

"Because of the volunteers, we saw increased involvement of the villagers themselves in building the library," said Mr. Nyame, adding that the project now wholly depends on contributions from the villagers.

The volunteers, who so far have been from the University of Pittsburgh, West Virginia University and Michigan State University, work with professional builders who do the technical aspects of construction.

What will be the first public library built in the Central Region in many years is an expansive oval building with an open courtyard on 10,000 square feet of land. It has two big rooms that will be used as library space for adults and children.

It has a large conference room, a book storage room and a computer center.

Site manager Thomas Yaw Asiedu said it will cost about $50,000 to complete the building, which now has a roof. Because of a lack of steady funding, Mr. Asiedu and others have no idea how long it will take them to complete the building.

"The important thing is that we are doing it on our own," said Mr. Nyame.

Jukwa, like most African villages, has a small trading center, lined with wooden kiosks, and most people here live on less than $100 a month. The Fante people here are mostly subsistence farmers who grow cocoa, palm fruit, plantain and cassava. There are eight primary schools, four junior high schools and one senior high school.

The small medical center in Jukwa is ill-equipped for basic public health services, particularly in pre-natal health care.

"One of the things we are really grateful for about this volunteer program is that the students come with an eagerness to help raise awareness especially [among] the women on things like HIV/AIDS, malaria and maternity health," said Mr. Nyame.

When Whitney Grespin, a student at the University of Pittsburgh's Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, arrived in Jukwa in May, she wanted to study how access to water or lack thereof affects the lives of women in the village.

But she realized water access was not the problem she thought it might have been when she got there, because a Qatari aid organization had just drilled a number of new water wells in the village.

"But I was also interested in how African women fit into the economic structure they live in," said Ms. Grespin, 24, who lived with a family in Jukwa from early May to late June.

A Hershey native who graduated from Duquesne University in 2006, Ms. Grespin spent her time teaching at a number of primary schools, where she was particularly interested in assessing the students' education level and what kind of books they would like to see in the finished library.

And when she was not teaching, she was at the local market talking to women about the feasibility of micro loan financing and whether such a financing scheme would enhance their lives if it were available to them.

She found the women to be very business-minded.

"They are not looking for handouts, but for opportunities to develop their small businesses and provide for their families," said Ms. Grespin.

Therein lies the key to development for Africa, Mr. Nyame said. "Africa is looking for the tools to empower itself, like what we are trying to do in Jukwa."