Students show
initiative and seek out local
challenges to address. In a
required four-year series of
leadership seminars,
students discuss issues critical
to building a better society.
After speaking with local
nonprofit leaders, students select their own
community service projects and
dedicate their time and skills
to making a difference.
College for Ama
(CofA)
Ashesi students and faculty
reach out to teach and inspire adolescent girls from
impoverished rural areas. College for Ama,
a Ghanaian nonprofit cofounded
by Ashesi’s Dean of Academic
Affairs,
Professor Nana Apt, uses
education to help break the
cycle of poverty among rural
women. A CofA summer program
brought twenty-eight adolescent girls from rural
communities to Ashesi’s campus
to live and study for one week.
Several of the
girls’ schools have 100% failure
rates on high school entry
exams. Ashesi faculty
volunteered to teach a variety
of courses from basic English
and math, to
nutrition and women’s sexual
health. Each CofA student was
paired with an Ashesi
student mentor who helped guide
her through the week. Courses were designed to
encourage creativity, social
awareness, self-esteem, and
self sufficiency. Most of
all, students learned that they,
too, can one day become college students if they
continue their education.
Skills for
former child soldiers
Ashesi students teach
former child soldiers from Liberia
practical skills to scale up
their small enterprises and subsistence
farms. Ashesi students
know that for former child soldiers
to earn a living and rebuild their society,
they’ll need practical skills.
So Ashesi
students traveled to a Liberian refugee camp
and, working in partnership with aid
organizations, set up a one-week class in simple
business fundamentals. The former
child soldier participants gave such
enthusiastic feedback that
Mediators Beyond Borders
has offered to help Ashesi seek funding to
extend the program. Ashesi students
hope to travel to Liberia to continue
working with the same organizations to
provide the skills the former child
soldiers will need in their difficult resettlement
process.
A different
career path
Araba Amuasi
‘07, a computer science major, turned down lucrative job offers
to become Operations Officer at an orphanage. She
plans to use her computer
science skills to completely
overhaul the orphanage
curriculum and to one day lead a transformation
of primary education in Ghana.
“If this
continent is to be salvaged, we
must improve our
primary education system. I want to be a
part of building a new Ghana, where
children look for the basic concepts
underlying the things they study, and
not how to commit procedures and
facts to memory only to pass an
exam.”