In 1985, Ghana’s economy faced severe strain from years of a military dictatorship. Knowing that he could not afford to study there otherwise, Swarthmore College accepted a young Patrick Awuah on a near-full scholarship. Arriving in the U.S with only $50 in his pocket, he double-majored— in economics and engineering— and went on to build a successful career at Microsoft.
Thirteen years later, he left Microsoft and came back to home to start a university in Ghana – Ashesi – which sought to bring what he had experienced at Swarthmore to Africa – a liberal arts education that taught students to think critically and live ethically, and which would train outstanding leaders in Africa. Today, millions of people have been impacted by the work of Ashesi’s graduates, and the university is recognised as one of Africa’s top private universities.
“When I went college, it was because I got financial aid,” Patrick Awuah explains. “I could not have gone to Swarthmore otherwise. I understand what an opportunity like that means, and I very much want to pass that forward.”
Since Ashesi’s inception, our commitment to making a world-class education available for financially disadvantaged students has remained unwavering. Over the past thirteen years, scholarships at Ashesi have steadily increased, with the University now providing over a million dollars in financial aid each year to promising students. Currently, 55% of students are on scholarships, funded by the Ashesi Foundation with support from partners around the world.
One of such partners, The MasterCard Foundation, provided $13 million in funding for bright students from extremely low-income families to come study at Ashesi in 2012.
“An education does more than liberate people from poverty, it is the foundation of social and economic progress,” said Reeta Roy, CEO of the MasterCard Foundation, during the launch of its Scholars Programme in 2012 United Nations Special Session marking the launch of Education First.
One example of the Ashesi education’s impact on African potential is the story of alumnus Kpetermeni Siakor ’15, who came to Ashesi on scholarship in 2011. With no Computer Science universities in his home country Liberia, and coming from a background of financial disadvantage, coming to Ghana was a great opportunity to pursue a lifelong passion. In his second year at Ashesi, with support from friends at Google, he helped deploy a tool in Liberia that allowed students in Monrovia to access open learning material with no Internet access. For resource-challenged Liberia, the tool opened up a new way of learning not previously explored in the country.
In 2014, as Ebola spread across Liberia, Kpetermeni reached out to colleagues back home looking for ways to help from Ghana. After learning that health workers were struggling to track and store data on Ebola cases, he built and helped deploy tools for the Liberian Ministry of Health that helped medical experts become more efficient at dealing with Ebola. The solution was timely, and helped speed up Liberia’s progress towards becoming Ebola-free.
For Kpetermeni, now working as Director of Innovation at the tech hub he helped establish, iLab Liberia, investing in higher education as a way of empowering Africans to solve their own problems is the best way forward in the long run.
“Liberians need to be empowered to help themselves,” he says. “Imagine how different the Ebola story would have been if more Liberians, Sierra Leoneans, and Guineans had opportunities like I did to develop skills through education. People were just waiting for help to come from outside. That just left the entire country vulnerable. Ebola has shown that we need to start looking at local solutions.”