Codiwompler

I first heard about the Future of Africa (FoA) organization from a friend who was working to fight slavery on Lake Volta in Ghana. When he heard that I was going to be in Accra, Ghana, he recommended I get in touch with TK, the director of FoA. TK was driving home in Accra when he encountered a boy lying on the ground. After driving past, he realized that this was a moment when someone needed help; he could possibly provide help, and to walk away was not only callous but also wrong. (How many of us have seen the same and kept on driving?) The rest is history; he just kept on learning, helping, and learning more so he could help more. Eventually, Future of Africa was born with the mission to “mentor youth to cultivate the hope, character, and skills to break the cycle of extreme poverty in Africa.”

TK picked us up and drove us to a safe house for teenage girls, enabling them to transition from living on the street to their new journey of transformation. Here, in this home, there were 12 young women and two children living in a single room but with additional rooms for cooking, congregating, and the offices of FoA. It is interesting that youth frequently don’t stay the first time you take them off the street. It takes multiple times before they realize that the structure and safety really are better than living in the street. (I can confirm this is true from my time working with street children in Maputo, Mozambique.)

In the evening, we went to the Kantamanto Market, near the Ashiedu Keteke Metro Station. There, we walked deep into the market, found the youth that FoA is familiar with, and invited them to come out for food and conversation. FoA comes every Sunday night to the market to meet with the homeless youth there and establish connections, trust, and relationships. In addition, they invite the youth out to the FoA center on Wednesdays. It is based on this mutual trust that FoA will, in time, invite the youth to come live in the refuge of an FoA home.

During the outreach, I spent most of my time talking with this woman, Faith, and playing with her daughter, Precious. Faith is in her early 20s and lives at the market, selling cooked plantains. You wonder what she ran away from such that she still chooses to live here with her daughter. Having walked through the alleys to find the youth, this is not a safe place to spend a night. There are drugs, pimps, and a social hierarchy that makes the weak submissive to the strong. I’m still disturbed by the story of how a guy might force himself on a sleeping girl there. Argh!

This is a very brief summary of our visit with FoA. I was so grateful for our delay in Accra because it afforded us the opportunity to participate in the market outreach. Even with that, we only scratched the surface of all that they were doing. Regardless, I was impressed and will discuss with Elisabeth adding FoA to our philanthropic portfolio this year.

Here are some of the qualities that impressed me about FoA:

• After the market outreach, they debriefed with the staff and volunteers, both on personal impact and reviewing the impact on the situations of the youth we were reaching. This was a training opportunity for the staff and volunteers, a review of the youth and where they are at in their journey, and an opportunity to raise any urgent issues the youth may be experiencing. The sincerity and consistency of FoA are key factors in building trust with the youth. A retrospective like this indicates value is placed on improving.
• TK is making significant sacrifices both for himself and his family. He could return to Canada or the US and build his career. Instead, he is taking a minimal income and sacrificing an established career to fight extreme poverty in Accra.
• The organization is frugal.
• There are very few organizations working with the Accra inner-city youth. FoA is, therefore, clearly filling a huge need here.
• I really like the stage approach to helping the youth. You can read more about it here. I think they are on the right track with this.
• They were aware that success for them is still undefined. This work is hard. Youth will go back to the street. There will be heart wrenching events in the lives of these youth. Some youth will go on to find jobs. Some will experience extreme abuse. Defining success across the various stages is difficult.
• Seemingly, the wealthy in Ghana just don’t care about those in poverty. Not only that, but churches aren’t stepping up either.¹ To change the culture, FoA is going to the university to provide training and then volunteer opportunities for students. In so doing, they are growing the hearts of the next generation of adults to love the poor. Students have an opportunity to interact with those experiencing extreme poverty and empathize with impoverished lives firsthand. This raises a generation of Ghanaian leaders who care.
• Not everything is perfect, but they are doing something, and it is making a positive impact on many youth.

In summary, I was impressed with the organization and will look to support them this year.

Action

Check out the Future of Africa website and consider supporting them. They are making an impact in a place where few other organizations are at work. Donating or volunteering to this organization will change people’s lives for the better.

^1. I was disappointed to learn that TK couldn’t get the church to step up and help. There is lots of church-service advertising along the roads. Unfortunately, it is advertising that seems to focus more on establishing a name for the preacher and increasing income for the church. Please forgive my synoecism, but what I could observe from the outside was not a Ghanaian church focused on the downtrodden, but rather the church of the preacher focused on wealth accumulation.

We specifically drove to the northern half of Ghana to visit the town of Sawla where we could visit both the Sawla School and the Sawla Hotel. IntelliTect began sponsoring the work of the International Assistant Program (IAP) organization back in 2012 with the building of a home for children. Once it was completed and running, the sponsorship transitioned to building a hotel where the kids could then work in order for the home to become self-sustaining. The hotel completion coincided with the completion of paving the main road to Sawla, thereby increasing traffic, especially traffic headed for the game park 1 hour further north. The end result was that IAP no longer requested our sponsorship; the program was essentially self-sufficient. In the non-profit world, this is a very rare occurrence, and Elisabeth and I were excited to have been part of the effort.

Somewhere along the way, the Ghanaian government requested that all child homes (like the Sawla Home) be closed and children get transitioned back into homes within the community. (This is consistent with the UN recommendation to care for orphans but general guidelines applied universally is likely to be problematic.) Unfortunately, this was not great for all the children, as now some of them were vulnerable in the same homes they previously left because they were unsafe. Regardless, rather than abandoning the community, IAP saw it as an opportunity to pivot. They transformed the home into a school for the community. They essentially built one classroom per year, so now they have a creche/nursery, two years of kindergarten, and primary school grades 1-3. There are 30 students in each class, for a total of 240 students. The numbers are in stark contrast to public schools, which generally number over 100 children per classroom, if not significantly more. And, as you can see in the photos, another classroom is under construction, having been completed by the time I wrote up this post.

During our stay in Sawla, our host, Moses, also took us to see some water wells that IAP had built. They noticed how people in the community had to walk a significant distance, frequently to the hotel, in order to obtain water. While they didn’t mind the visit, they built a couple community wells so that the women (yes, the women are generally the ones collecting the water) wouldn’t have to walk so far carrying the water. We already heard the gratitude of the chief for the first well yesterday. For the second well, seeing it in use by these women (I love the smiles) was a blessing.

I was impressed that the focus was on the wells, not the well-builders. IAP didn’t mount a plaque declaring the water well was built by Christians for a Muslim community or such. It was a water well, and that is enough.

While the work of IAP in the Sawla community is amazing, it isn’t all ideal. I share this because I strongly believe that philanthropy is like an investment. Sometimes investments yield 100 fold or more; sometimes they struggle; and sometimes they fail. Any organization, especially one working in Africa where stuff inevitably happens, gains more credibility when they share the good and the bad. Here are a few examples: After the hotel, IAP attempted farming to supply food for the hotel along with additional jobs for the children living in the home. (Toward this effort, we sponsored the purchase of a tractor.) Unfortunately, the economics didn’t pan out, and they couldn’t make the farm profitable. In addition, they started a bakery. I was excited to hear how this was going since occasionally we have been unable to find bread along our journey, and I thought a bakery would make a great small business in the community. While the bakery is still running and we enjoyed eating the fresh bread during our stay, it isn’t profitable. Inflation throughout Africa is a major problem. (In Ghana, for example, the annual inflation is around 40%.) Therefore, to remain profitable, the bakery needs to increase prices to account for the higher price of goods and labor. However, the community expects the price of bread to remain relatively static in spite of inflation. And, rather than buy bread at a higher price, they go without the luxury of it altogether. Finally, during the COVID epidemic, tourism was essentially shut down, and since then, it has not fully recovered. The result is that in the first full year post-COVID, they are not quite profitable. When you consider all the jobs they are providing, especially for former residents in the home, along with the additional help they provide at the school, it is still making a wonderful impact on the community, but it isn’t currently self-sustaining like it once was. Like any business, discussions are under way on how to pivot based on the new findings. One possible option, for example, is to expand into supporting conferences.

One more comment about IAP and the work in Sawla. The IAP leadership team first met Moses, our host, because he was their driver from Accra to Sawla – originally a 2-day drive. Now, he is their trusted leader in Ghana. He never graduated from school, has no leadership training, and works as a used car salesman for his regular job. And yet, he is making a huge impact on the lives of hundreds in Sawla and maintains an incredible humility about it. He is an impressive man whom we enjoyed hanging out with during our visit to Sawla.

Action

IAP continues to invest in the school and support the hotel. I highly recommend you consider sponsoring IAP and the work they are doing, either in Sawla or elsewhere.

Also, there are numerous organizations that dig wells in Africa. The two organizations that IntelliTect has supported and that I would highly recommend are IAP (here in Sawla, Ghana) and World Vision (in Southern Kenya). A water well investment with IAP in Ghana generally costs less than $5,000. In Kenya, the investment is significantly higher at $15,000. In addition,