ACCRA ACADEMY DORMITORY PROJECT
Take a good look at the schoolboy in the photograph. He’s the face of Ghana’s future.
He will become one of the engineers, designers, doctors, teachers or intellectuals
that will make Ghana a progressive leader among nations. He will, but only if we
make it possible for him. Does he seem pensive - a little anxious and doubtful, perhaps?
He is, because he wants to go to Accra Academy when he gets older, but he’s worried
about what he will face when he gets there.
Will he find cramped dormitories with barely six inches between the rusting bunk beds?
Will he be forced to go into the bush to relieve himself because the toilets are full
to the brim and don’t flush? Will he be met by overcrowded classrooms and a dusty
library with useless old books? Will he go to an Information and Communications Technology
class only to discover there aren’t enough computers, no Internet connection and no
information, communications or technology? He will find all those things and worse if
we don’t act. Because right now, these are the conditions faced by the valuable young
students of Accra Academy.
Take a walk around the grounds of our beloved school and it tugs at the heart.
The school that played such an important part in getting us to where we are today is
struggling like a drowning man barely able to keep his head above water. He is trying to
survive, but he needs a lifeline. Accra Academy needs a lifeline. Government funds in
Ghana are spread thin. Whatever our arguments about what government should or should not
be doing, that’s the reality, and all of us who live in the United States know that the
best institutions thrive because they are buoyed up by private endowments.
Together we can make Accra Academy the premier school in Ghana. We were once the
students who are there now, and they deserve the best the same way we did and the
way the next generations will.
There are many challenges for the school, among them the completion of the
unfinished dormitory whose construction stalled in 2005 because of insufficient funds.
That’s where we want to start – finish the dormitory that was begun, and then move on
to other projects after that.
Sincerely,
Accra Academy Alumni