Want to learn more about the non-profit organizations featured in Africa.com’s Africa Straight Up? Here’s the round-up.
Based in Kenya and in Washington D.C., this organization focuses on providing vital educational opportunities for children living in Kibera, Nairobi’s largest slum. Headed by Kenneth Okoth, Children of Kibera offers scholarships for high school students to attend boarding schools in preparation for university.
Student Sponsorship Programme of South Africa:
Founded in 2000 and based in Johannesburg and Cape Town, SSP provides elite education to high-school students through five-year scholarships. The program aims to combat certain legacies left from the era of apartheid, when black students could not afford to attend white secondary schools.
Former supermodel Anna Getaneh is the founder behind ECF, which was first established 14 years ago. The fund supports the building and maintenance of its Education and Development Programme in Aleltu, Ethiopia, providing a stable educational complex for children between the ages of 4 and 17. The ECF also aims to improving the quality of healthcare in the village for all of Aleltu’s occupants.
This four-year, private and non-profit university is based in Accra, Ghana, and was founded in 2001 by Patrick Awuah, Jr. Mr. Awuah made his fortune as a program manager at Microsoft in the 1990s; after retiring from Microsoft, he moved back to Ghana, his homeland, to set up Ashesi, which now serves over 500 students every year.
The inspiration behind Infinite Family struck Amy Stokes, the founder, in 2003, when she and her husband traveled to Johannesburg to adopt their son from an orphanage of children left behind by the ravages of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in South Africa. Ms. Stokes—who last year was nominated as one of CNN’s Heroes of 2011—saw that these children, without regular and devoted contact with loving adults, were losing opportunities of support and growth. By creating an accessible and easy-to-use technological platform, Ms. Stokes and her team created a way in which teenagers from southern and sub-Saharan Africa could communicate via video chats with adult mentors on a weekly basis.
As the need for business managers continues to grow at a rapid pace across the continent, the Lagos Business School of the Pan-African University in Lagos, Nigeria, aims to fill the ranks with trained MBAs. In 1996, LBS joined with Barcelona’s IESE Business School to begin offering MBA degrees, and in 2003, LBS began offering its own MBA certificates.
Newsletter
RSS