Mission

The mission of the Elmina Stem Foundation is to provide olive branch to people all over the world who want to get educated especially in the STEMs but lack the needed resources to acquire this education or training. The economic impact of the pandemic coupled with the recent fuel price hikes caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has made it even much difficult for residents of developing countries to acquire education and training.

Many students have already dropped out of school with many more to follow if humanitarian efforts are not amplified. That will lead to a decrease in the improvement of the Human Capital Index of many such nations resulting in erosion of the educational gains they have made over the years.

With this will comes its attendant problems of poverty, hunger, conflict, and diseases. The mission of the Elmina Foundation is to work to assuage and mitigate the economic impact of the pandemic and war on education.

Vision

It is our long-term vision to find ways to provide cheap and accessible education to students and people who want education and training in these trying times to avert a future of even more destitution caused by lack of attention on some people who will fall through the cracks caused by circumstances beyond their control.

Our Vision is to:

• Provide Scholarships to students at various levels of education with a focus on the STEMs

• Provide accommodation to students at various levels of education.

• Provide equipment like laptops, printers, scanners, lab equipment, and other accessories to students and apprentices to get through their programs.

• Establish training and apprentice centers across the globe to help train and educate people in the informal sector.

• Establish STEM universities and Polytechnics across the globe.

Background

Education is the key to success; this is an old saying that suggests that education is the surest bet to digging oneself out of perennial poverty. It doesn’t mean that one cannot do well without education, but empirical evidence abounds that education has an almost perfect probability of lifting one out of poverty.

Education like many other necessities is not cheap. It requires money to educate the people who need education. Unfortunately, many of the people who badly need the education to get themselves and their successive generations out of poverty do not have the little money needed to go to school; they can’t afford it.

This keeps them in generational poverty with no hope for a better future. Using Ghana as a case study, data from some of the poorest districts indicate that 74% of boys and 83% of girls drop out of school in primary school. Before 2017, 25% of all students who completed junior high were not able to go to high school largely due to financial difficulties.

The government of Ghana, realizing this problem has introduced several policies aimed at reducing school dropout rates at the various levels of education in the country. One of such policies was the F-CUBE; Free Compulsory Basic Education. F-CUBE was introduced in 1995 in Ghana. It took away the payment of fees for basic schools. The retention rate in basic schools increased but not to appreciable levels.

The government of Ghana, therefore, introduced the school feeding program to provide food for children in basic schools. Government of Ghana-based this decision on results from the United Kingdom and the United States of America where similar programs were introduced in the 1930s. It was evident that retention rates increased impressively when these nations introduced similar feeding programs in their schools.

In 2017, the government introduced free high school education in Ghana. This saw the annual high school enrolment increase from 800,000 to 1.2 million. This is evident that payment of tuition fees was keeping about 400,000 students from going to high school. (Population of Ghana is 31 million)

Even with the introduction of all these policies, there is still a lot of work that needed to be done to lift many people who have other issues keeping them from getting an education. Some have issues with clothing. There are some children who do not go to school because they don’t have clothes and shoes to wear to school. Some don’t because they help their parents out with whatever they do for a living, farming fishing, etc.

You will be amazed you how smart and brilliant some of these kids are. There are numerous testimonies of people who were born in such situations but had the opportunity to go to school and have become doctors, lawyers, engineers, bankers, public officers’ holders, and even entrepreneurs who are now part of the country’s growing middle and upper classes.

At the moment, government subsidizes the payment of fees for state-owned universities but even with the subsidies, many are not able to afford it. There are many students who can now go through education to the high school level because of the various social intervention policies but fail to secure tertiary education due to financial challenges.

There are some students who make it may be through the benevolence of some magnanimous people. Some also drop out due to financial challenges. It is with a heavy heart that we report that some female students sell themselves out through prostitution, dating sugar daddies, and keeping multiple boyfriends who help them financially through college. Some male students have resulted to addictive betting with the hope that they will win and use the proceeds to fund their educations.

The financial hurdle is even worse for students in STEM. On average STEM education is expensive relative to non-stem education. This is largely due to the cost of material and equipment needed in STEM education.