School Projects Yo Ghana! Is Supporting--Can You Help?

Grant Projects: An Invitation to Smart Giving

Though the heart of our mission at Yo Ghana! are the transformative letters between students in Ghana and the Pacific Northwest, we offer our Ghana partners modest grants, usually about $500 per year.  These grants require and foster local initiative: we support projects that schools have started and funded.

Several schools are still shaping their requests, but here are this year’s projects so far:

Anani Memorial International School  This K-6 school is located in the heart of Nima, one of the largest slums in Accra, Ghana's capital.  Although tuition is just $100.00 per year, many parents are unable to pay it.  But some twenty parents, such as the mother shown here, have donated roughly $300 worth of time, skills, and goods to the school: cooking oil, onions, music lessons, trash removal, and much more in a place where thousands of people work twelve hours a day for a dollar or two.  In exchange Yo Ghana! provides scholarship assistance.  Headmaster Kofi Anane reports that this focus on self-help has raised the community’s sense of pride and investment in the school.

Nipaba Brew School in Sampa, on the border of Côte d'Ivoire, is an outstanding private school that serves many students from families of modest means.  It excels at teaching literacy at a very young age.  The school estimates that the 3-in-1 printer that Yo Ghana has helped it to purchase will pay for itself in a year as well as saving many hours of staff time a month.

St. Kizito School, K-9, a public school run by two exceptionally dedicated priests, is located in a remote part of Ghana's Northern Region.  The school has to turn away students to keep its overcrowding from becoming even worse.  So the community has built the foundation and walls for three new classrooms (see the photo to the right) that would take the average kindergarten class down from ninety to fifty students.  Yo Ghana! contributed one third of the costs of roofing the new classrooms, and once the school is able to match that amount we will provide the final third.

Evangelical Church of Ghana School in Tamale, the Northern Region's capital city, is an outstanding K-9 private school with modest tuition.  But many strong students struggle to make their payments.  Napari, described by his teacher, Madam Clara, as “one of the bright students in the class,” is from a family of thirteen, and his father is not able to earn enough from farming and carpentry to pay all of his children’s school fees.  Yo Ghana! is contributing to a scholarship fund so that bright students such as Napari can keep attending this school.

Angel's Academy on the outskirts of Accra began as a free school in Mr. Ernest Opoku-Ansah’s living room.  More than twenty years later it has become a very successful private school that continues to serve many students from poorer families.  The school took a big risk in building a computer laboratory and staff room with its own funds and has asked Yo Ghana! for help in providing new or reconditioned laptops for it.

Savelugu Senior High School, shown here, is one of the leading and largest educational institutions in Northern Ghana, with particular attention to the sciences.   The school’s PTA has contributed both funds and labor to create two sets of urinals for its students and women faculty, which will save them much time and inconvenience.  Yo Ghana! is matching their contribution.

Smart phones.  As internet connections are often spotty in rural Ghana, we are providing smart phones costing roughly $90.00 each to several of our Ghana schools so that they can send pdfs of letters when the internet is down and more easily share photos with their U.S. partners.

Laptops.  Many of our schools are looking for sturdy laptops, which can be much more easily carried to Ghana than desktop computers.  Please let us know if you have some to donate.

Remember, your contributions are tax deductible, and our overhead is next to nothing.  We have no offices or even a PO box, and our board members donate their time, travel expenses, and several thousand dollars a year.  Our very busy teachers do their Yo Ghana! work on top of their many other duties, and our Ghana teachers commonly dig into their own pockets to buy internet and phone time to communicate with us.  So if you are looking for a scrappy little nonprofit where your money will go a long way and to the right places, we are glad you are reading this.

There is a link to our Paypal account on our website, or e-mail yoghana.org@gmail.comyoghana.org@gmail.com to send a check.