When we first arrived in the Ghanaian village of Asisiriwa in the Ashanti Region in 2015, we were introduced to the community by Professor Kofi Agyekum, a renowned linguist and native son of the village. We discussed the idea of a language arts center in collaboration with the village, which had a good track record of “self-help” in the realm of education. This was evidenced by an unfinished computer lab that sat next to the junior high school, completely financed by the members of the community. I remember being impressed – we hadn’t seen that level of community involvement in education in two months of searching the country for it.
Construction in Ghana happens slowly. The landscape is littered with the concrete skeletons of buildings as people add to them little-by-little when they get some spending cash. In the five years since we first visited Asisiriwa, the computer lab has gotten a roof, plastering, and a tiled floor, which is really impressive considering it was entirely funded by the community itself. I’m constantly in awe of the people in this village who are willing to make sacrifices so that their children can have a future more promising than their own. They inspire me.
2015 
2020
Unfortunately, Asisiriwa has fallen on tough financial times. This comes at a time when the government of Ghana has pushed through free senior high school legislation, guaranteeing free education to all its children. This is admirable and so important, but it means now – at this early stage – the system is stretched thin as the Ghana Educational Service races to build new schools and train new teachers to handle all the new students. This means that the school in Asisiriwa has no money.
So the computer lab sits there, waiting. It’s functional enough to serve as a classroom building (it has two rooms), but there’s little hope of it becoming an actual computer lab in the near future. In the meantime, generations of primary and JHS students come and go, learning about computer science without ever touching a computer.
The community might be able to scrape together the funds to finish the building in the next five years. It still needs windows, the rest of the window bars, a ceiling, electrical outlets, light sockets, and furniture. However, even if the community paid for all that, they have virtually no hope of equipping it with actual computers. Very few people there own computers. Even the teachers – the best-paid inhabitants of Asisiriwa – struggle to afford a laptop. Their thought is that if they can get just ten computers, four or five students can share during computer science class.
Class sizes in Asisiriwa are supposed to be 30 students, but due to overcrowding, they’re typically 40 strong. That means that – ideally – the computer lab would have 80 computers: 40 for the primary class and 40 for JHS class. There’s just no way the village can get those. Electronics in Ghana are seriously overpriced due to import, transportation, and resale fees.
I have no interest in playing the white savior – we’ve denounced that mentality since our founding. Everything we do, we want to do in partnership with local communities – with them, not for them. That said, here’s my idea:
- Step 1: The community can initiate a final collection for finishing of the computer lab with the promise that Untold International will match – cedi-for-cedi – whatever contributions they make with the goal of completing the building itself.
- Step 2: We would like to find a school or business somewhere that phases out their desktop computers and would be interested in donating 80 (or more) to Untold International, complete with towers, monitors, keyboard, mice, and cables. This would be an in-kind, tax-deductible donation. We will ship the computers to Ghana and transport them to Asisiriwa. If you know any place willing to donate their computers, please pass this along to them.
I would like to raise at least $3,000 among our supporters to pull this off, in addition to the computers. If this story strikes a chord within you, if bringing computer literacy to this disadvantaged, rural community gets you excited, please consider getting involved.
Even if you can’t make a large donation, you can join our Untold Dollar supporters and contribute a single dollar every month to a well that we can draw from for years to come.
An important note: Please make sure you’re paying with a linked bank account on PayPal and not a credit card – with credit cards we only get $0.67 of your dollar.
If you’d share this campaign with your friends and help expand our Untold Dollar community, you’d be making a contribution too big for me to adequately thank you for.
A huge thank you to everyone who’s already on this ride with us. Let’s see who gets empowered down the road by this story.
