With the beginning of the year we had to bear a setback. We had applied for public funding und hoped that we could start the construction of the school with it. Unfortunately we were classified into a minor funding category and so the already planned project couldn’t be realized due to the big total costs.

However we were not put off through that und started to plan a smaller project of which we will be reporting below. Furthermore our partners in Ghana were very successful in negotiating with the Ghanaian education service (GES) and received an acceptance letter which guarantees the take-over of the school by government once it is completed. This is a big success for us since it means that no further costs for running the school will become due for our NGO.

Die Organisatorinnen des Sportfestes übergaben die Spende bei der Schulabschlussfeier

In July we were happy about the great commitment of the students of the Joseph-von-Fraunhofer Gymnasium (JvFG) Cham. Together they ran 1116 km for charity reasons. For each round a private sponsor donated 2€ to our project or the JvFGs partner school in Togo. So that in the end we could thank them for an amazing donation of 365.40€.

We already invested part of this sum in the small project we talked above. Our Ghanaian partners had initiated it already in the beginning of the year. Because according to a study by the GES huge deficits in education can be traced back to lacking reading experience. However the children in Ghana often don’t have the opportunity to read, since they hardly own any books themselves and not every school is equipped with a library. That’s why our partners from the NEA acquired in total 600 reading books from various Ghanaian authors and distributed them to children in four primaries and JHS in the area. But the project is not done yet, because with events like reading competitions we want to further encourage the children to practice reading.

Even though we made a visible impact with this project our main focus lies on our big aim: the establishment of a secondary school. And we approached this in the second half of the year.

Already in August the planning of a new project to build a small part of the school complex began.
This will contain a 42 m² big classroom, an office and a storeroom. Additionally a sanitary station with four separated toilet booths will be constructed. Furthermore the project includes the furnishing with desks and the provision of the relevant schoolbooks, so that directly after the end of the project the education in form of a pre-school can start.

Even though we have reduced this project to the essential elements, it still exceeds our NGOs financial resources. That’s why we began with writing an application for funding to the W.P. Schmitz foundation in September, which supports NGOs in executing projects in unprivileged countries. The application was already submitted to the foundation and should be examined in the beginning of the year.

Simultaneously we wanted to motivate as many donators with our “10for10” campaign to acquire the missing part of the budget of 10,000€. We could raise a lot of attention with a tedious video and reports in the local media, so that we had already collected more than 7,000€ before Christmas. During the Christmas days we received some further generous donations which helped us to reach our goal already before the end of the year. Nevertheless the campaign is still running and we are happy about any donation which will be guaranteed put in our project.

We hereby want to thank all our supporters for the last year. We are looking forward to the year 2020, when according to all projections we will start with the construction and we hope that we accomplish many more great projects to assist the children in the North of Ghana in getting an education of high quality. Thank you very much!