Our History:


In the summer of 2005, a group of Ghanaian college students hosted an event in their home town to provide achievement awards to exemplary teachers and pupils from the local elementary and middle schools. Education in their town, Yonso, faced the same problems as thousands of other rural communities across Africa and the world -- a lack of educational resources and teachers, a lack of basic facilities (most buildings in Yonso lack water or electricity), and all of the other obstacles that come with high poverty rates. These students, led by a psychology major named Kwabena Danso and working completely independently of foreign donors or NGOs, created their own organization dedicated to supporting local education in Yonso. They called themselves the Yonso Students' Union, and their mission could be summarized as this: if we were able to beat the odds to graduate from school and attend college ourselves, we should do something to help other kids from our home town do the same.

Meanwhile, across the globe, a group of American college students at schools around the US were preparing for a semester studying abroad at the University of Ghana. They'd chosen to travel to Ghana to experience its many rich, fascinating cultures and its natural beauty, but many also wanted to see firsthand the complexities of development and poverty in Africa. Upon arriving in Ghana that August, they viscerally experienced the fact that millions of Ghanaians have no access to basic health care, liveable housing, or even enough food to healthily live. As with many Americans confronted with global poverty face to face for the first time, the poverty and need in Ghana created a sense of helplessness at the sheer scale of the country's problems -- and then they met Kwabena Danso.

Danso recognized that the mission of Yonso Students' Union could benefit enormously from networking with international students. He sought out American students at the University who were interested in giving back to their host country and invited several of them to travel across Ghana to visit his home town, Yonso. The efforts of the Yonso Students' Union were apparent in the small town, most visibly in the new school library that had been built largely due to active fundraising by the Students' Union. But as Danso pointed out, the library contained only a few shelves of books. To the American students who had been searching for an answer to the question of "what can we do to help?", the empty library seemed like an invitation to get involved. To Danso, and to the kids in Yonso, the involvement of the Americans opened up a world of possibilities.

For the remainder of their semester in Ghana, the American students worked with Danso and the Yonso Students' Union to make plans. Together, they filmed an amateur documentary about Yonso and the struggle for education in rural Ghana and brainstormed ideas about how the resources available to American students could best be used to help with education in Yonso. By 2006, the Americans were back in the US. But for one of those students, Nick Caccavo, the work was just beginning.

Nick spent his last semester at the University of Vermont organizing a drive to collect schoolbooks to stock the same library he'd seen in Yonso, rallying help from his family and friends to ultimately send more than ten thousand pounds of books across the Atlantic (other American students from the Ghana trip also made minor contributions). By the time the books had been collected, packaged, and shipped -- paid for using funds raised by Nick and his friend Sonja -- the drive had begun to resemble a more permanent organization. Nick, Sonja, and several other friends who had also helped with the book decided to form a board, and the Yonso Project was born as an incorporated nonprofit.

The Yonso Project has grown steadily both in the US and in Ghana since we were incorporated in 2006. We have members and regular donors in communities, colleges, and high schools across the US, many of whom have now been supporting the Yonso Project for years. In Ghana, our programs have met with such high demand that we have opened a permanent office Yonso and other communities in the surrounding area: Kyekyewere, Apaah, and Akrofonso. We have provided educational assistance to hundreds of students individually and to the local schools as a whole, and our microlending program has provided $54,000 of loans to struggling families. But, as the Yonso Project has rapidly grown and its mission has evolved, we have remained an organization that is administered by individual volunteers and funded primarily by individual donors.

To learn more about how exactly we are addressing poverty and other problems in Ghana please visit the "Our Work" page; to make a donation to the Yonso Project, please click here.