Tag Archives: education
Success Story from the Gambia: Salimatou Fatty, Advocate for Children’s and Women’s Rights
Salimatou Fatty was born in Kerewan village in the North Bank Division of the Gambia in 1994 to modest and loving parents Aja Fatoumatta Jarra Ceesay and Alhajie Saikou Fatty. When she was just one year old, her father passed away. Salimatou is the seventh of her mother’s nine children, but has nearly 20 siblings […]
Success Story from Kenya: Collins Nakedi, Empowering Youths through Education
Collins Plimo Nakedi was born in October 1989 and raised in East Pokot, Kenya, a pastoralist community in which more than 95 percent of the people are illiterate. One of 14 children, Collins felt extremely fortunate to be the only one in his family to have the chance to go to school and get an […]
Success Story from Guinea: Mamoudou Nagnalen Barry, Empowering Future Generations through Education
SPECIAL BONUS POST in honor of October marking one year of African Development Successes. Mamoudou Nagnalen Barry was born in Kankan, Guinea in September of 1985. Barry, as his friends and family call him, was a middle child in a family of 20. With such a large family and very low incomes, it was a […]
Success Story from Ghana: Hikmat Baba Dua, An Advocate for Women’s Education
Hikmat Baba Dua was born in April 1990 in Tamale, the conservative northern regional capital of Ghana. As a youngster, Hikmat’s father, who is more than proud of her today, told her that “educating a girl is useless.” The statement so distressed young Hikmat that it became a turning point in her life, one that […]
Success Story from Tanzania: Amnah Ibuni’s Sure Steps School
Amnah Feisal-Amin Ibuni is a young Tanzanian woman who was born in 1987 in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. When her father passed away when she was only eight years old she and her family moved back to Tanzania. Growing up in Zanzibar, Amnah was distressed when she witnessed many of her female friends drop out of […]
Success Story from Nigeria: Dr. Toyin Falola Promotes African Studies
Toyin Omoyeni Falola was born 1953 in Ibadan, Nigeria. In the 1960s, he dropped out of high school to join a peasant rebellion that protested high taxation and the ill treatment of farmers. During and after the rebellion, young Toyin kept wondering why it was that some, including his own grandfather, had to lose their […]
Success Story from Zimbabwe: Strive Masiyiwa Supports Education
Strive Masiyiwa was born in Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, in 1961. He attended primary school in Zambia, completed his secondary education in Scotland, and obtained a degree in electrical engineering in Wales. In 1984 he returned to Zimbabwe and set up an electrical engineering business, which by 1989 was quite large and successful. With the […]
Success Story from South Africa: Fred Swaniker and The African Leadership Academy
Fred Swaniker’s family left Ghana when he was just four years old. The family moved about such that Mr. Swaniker lived in four African countries before he was 18 years old. As a young man, while living in Botswana, Mr. Swaniker’s recently widowed mother was asked by her community to start a school. She agreed, […]
Success Story from Ghana: Patrick Awuah, Founder of Ashesi University
UPDATED January 5, 2016. I was first ‘introduced’ to Mr. Awuah through a snapshot of his life presented in William Easterly’s The White Man’s Burden (2007), a book my students read in their first semester of a multi-year academic service learning program called Periclean Scholars, for which I serve as the faculty adviser. The brief […]
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