Day 5 – “Welcome to Ghana”

Leslie: Incredibly, the trip only got better from there. Despite a less-than-smooth negotiation of our path through the Lagos airport, we had a nice traveling day.

Ghana won us over almost immediately when we landed in the beautiful new airport in Accra, were welcomed to an air conditioned bus with powerful, much-needed coffee, and headed through beautiful green countryside toward Ashesi University.

Ashesi was one of the highlights of the trip. A mini-Stanford University with a beautiful, new, well-kept campus far outside of Accra in the countryside of Ghana (amid small wooden houses and gravel roads), the university was full of students with similar aspirations to our own (I spoke with one girl who was interning at Goldman Sachs during the coming summer, and several were entrepreneurs – one was starting a bakery). The story of the University’s founding (difficulty fundraising, difficulty convincing students and parents to believe in a curriculum less based on memorizing a core subject and more on teaching how to think with a strong liberal arts base) was an inspiring case on what really choosing to make a difference looks like.

  

We got another glimpse into the challenges of fundraising for educational causes when we met with the woman who conceived of the Golden Baobob, a pan-African prize for children’s literature. The prize aims to promote the writing of African stories for African children to learn to read. We turned a little consultant-like in offering suggestions on how to get more out of the prize and promote its winners (read: an aggressive interrogation by Professor Berk J), but overall had a warm conversation with the founder of the prize.

Andrew:   Getting to Ghana was a challenge, and I had some personal experience with the idea that “facilitating payments” is not just a concept we learned in Global!

Personally, Patrick Awuah was the most inspiring leader we met.  As someone who has worked on a startup before, I can only imagine how impossible it is to “startup” a university.  I left wondering about the education space, and what I could do to help it.