Five young Ghanaian girls who are academically gifted but financially disadvantaged are to benefit from scholarship awards tenable in universities around the globe in the 2009/2010 academic year.
Dr Susan Mboya, daughter of the late Kenyan Trade Unionist and Pan Africanist, Tom Mboya, made this known to the press while launching the Ghana Chapter of the Zawadi Africa Educational Fund in Accra on Friday.
The Fund seeks to assist young girls with exceptional leadership traits and skills to attend top universities around the globe.
Dr Mboya, Executive Director of Zawadi Africa Educational Fund, said the Fund would award places for the five bright, curious and highly intelligent girls from Ghana to enrol in universities and colleges either in Ghana or overseas.
To date, Zawadi has awarded scholarships to over 80 students in approximately 55 colleges and universities, including Yale, MIT, Smith College, University of Miami, Villanova University, Hamilton College and Hillsdale College.
"Zawadi, which means "gift" in Swahili, has given away almost USD 12 million (GH¢18 million) in scholarship value to date. In 2008, Zawadi formed a partnership with the global technology giant Google to create scholarships at African universities focused on women in engineering," Dr Mboya stated.
Dr Mboya, in her brief to the media on the programme, said the Mboyas, together with former United States President John F. Kennedy, pioneered the concept of sending African students overseas for university education with the Mboya/Kennedy airlifts in 1959.
The Mboya-Kennedy programme recorded many resounding successes when these students returned to lead key institutions such as the universities, government and ministries.
One such student won a Nobel Peace prize while another is Barack Obamah Senior, the father of President Barak Obamah, first black President of the United States of America.
Dr Mboya said Zawadi, in partnership with Google, spread its tents to Ghana and Uganda as part of its expansion programme with grants from Google and Coca cola African Foundation.
"As part of our ongoing efforts to supporting education in Africa and to diversifying the engineering talent pool, we are encouraging African women to pursue careers in computer science and technology," she said.
She explained that the programme, which started about seven years ago, aimed at improving the lives of young girls for them to mend the world.
"We monitor and repatriate all our students back home to practise what they learnt whilst in school and through a peer mentorship drive under the watch word 'Each One Teach One,'" she said.
The core values of the Zawadi Education Fund are leadership, integrity, self-determination and giving.
The selection process for prospective candidates,
Dr Mboya said, depended on their score in the West Africa Senior High School Examination.
Students with aggregate six to seven must originate from poor backgrounds as potential choices for the scheme, she stated.
She stressed that Zawadi had given itself an aggressive goal of awarding 1,000 scholarships for girls in over 25 African countries by 2015.
"With the current economic turmoil that the world is experiencing, we believe that the need for this programme is greater than ever and we hope that we receive the support and encouragement of the local corporate, NGOs and the public sector as we embark on this important mission," she said.
Dr Mboya said the Fund, when introduced in Ghana, would be manned by a carefully selected board who would screen and select candidates for placement on the programme.
Persons who would constitute this board must be people who understood the programme and are driven by passion and credibility so as not to compromise the aims of the programme.
Ms Estelle Akofio-Sowah, Country Manager of Google and Coordinator for Zawadi Education Fund in Ghana, said Google had entered into partnership with Zawadi to award scholarships to students of Engineering to enrol at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Kumasi.