Dr. Patrick Awuah Jr. is the founder and President of Ashesi University, a private, liberal arts college situated in the Eastern Region. With his distinct and unbridled desire for education, Dr. Awuah has earned international acclaim for his commitment to creating a model for quality and private education in Africa. His school has over the years profoundly gained an appreciable reputation for its innovation and quality provision of education in Ghana.
His journey to the realization of his dream in educating the Ghanaian populace is predicate on his belief in the liberal art and educating the Ghanaian youth in more practical ways than just being book smart.
Young Awuah, grew up in Accra, but left Ghana in 1985 to pursue his education in the United States during which Ghana was economically crippled under a military dictatorship. He was accepted by Swarthmore College on a part scholarship that required him to pay the balance of $400. However, his family couldn’t afford the said amount and that prompted the U.S. Embassy to initially reject his application for a visa.
Realizing his potential, Swarthmore rectified the problem portending to ground his educational aspiration by giving him a full scholarship. There, Patrick earned a bachelor’s degree in Engineering. Later, he earned an honorary Doctorate Degree from the same college– Swarthmore College.
Having excelled, his degree in engineering landed him in an enviable position as a program’s manager and engineer for the Microsoft Corporation in Seattle. Patrick spearheaded the software design for dial-up internet access and gained a reputation for bringing difficult projects to completion, making millions in the process.
After much deliberation and self-searching moments, Patrick Awuah left Microsoft in 1997 amidst a Pan-African crisis. The news in the US about Rwanda and Somalia were horrifying for him and he felt the urgent need for Africa to be redefined and experience a new lease on life for posterity’s sake.
Admittedly, Mr. Awuah concedes to the fact that quitting Microsoft was not an easy decision, however his supportive American wife stuck with him through the process. Inspired also by the saying of the famous German writer, Goethe, “Whatever you can do or dream, you can begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it — begin it now”.
Mr. Awuah found courage to pursue his dream for his home country. His goal, on returning was to build a country his children would be proud of. His mission, exiting the land of opportunities and entering into his homeland where he desired to create opportunities to educate a new generation of ethical leaders in Africa. This is because, he reckons ethics, empathy and compassion as crucial ingredients for the next trove of leaders of this continent.
Being in Ghana, his initial plan was to first start a software company, a planned replication of a company he had established in America. However, he realized such venture would not fly because of the wide chasm in curriculum between the two countries. For one thing, students in Ghana studying computer science only learn by rote and not privy to the practicality of what is being read in books. Contrarily, education in the USA is more analytical and the faculty wants to hear what students think.
Based on this, in 1998, he conferred with some friends to travel to Ghana to complete a feasibility study on creating a private university. They tracked the actual cause of the problem and trickled it down to leadership. Noted for being a problem-solver himself, Mr. Awuah identified that the country’s future leaders needed to be more engaged in problem-solving activities. Committed to providing greater education opportunities in Ghana, he went back to school, earning a Master’s degree at Berkeley, where he learned how organizations function, as he was limited by his knowledge in engineering.
Funded partly by his savings, donors, private individuals and organizations, Mr. Awuah founded Ashesi University in 1999 but opened its doors in 2002 to its first class of 30 students. Sitting on a 100 acres land in a town called Berekuso, outside the capital, the university is designed to be inspiring for young Ghanaians studying there. The University has grown organically to bring that vision to fruition. The University’s name “Ashesi” translates into the term “Beginnings” and it’s the first Ghanaian university to combine technical majors with a liberal arts approach. This has opened the floodgate of opportunities for young gifted Africans to aspire to their uniqueness and potency in ameliorating their country’s problems.
Passionate as he is, Mr. Awuah strongly believes that people like him who have had the privilege of a great education need to be part of the solution. As of 2016, the Berekuso campus was a small college showcase, with over 500 students partaking in a curriculum that is said to be the perfect blend of liberal arts and sciences. The avid educationist reveals that the university brings together a diverse mix of students from different backgrounds, including scholarship-winning undergraduates from humble beginnings who are the first in their families to attend college. The University currently has 2,863 students and alumni.
Efforts and results are indeed rewarded and Mr. Patrick Awuah is outstandingly deserving of the throng of awards he has amassed over the years. Ashesi University was ranked as one of the top ten Most Respected Companies in Ghana, and was the first educational institution to win the award. In November 2009, he won two prestigious awards, being the 2009 Microsoft Alumni Foundation “Integral Fellow” award; a program honouring Microsoft Alumni who have made a meaningful difference in the daily lives of others by using their talents, time and resources to contribute to the community.
In May, 2010, he was nominated as the ‘8th Ghana’s Most Respected CEO’ voted in the top ten in Ghana, a ranking based on a survey of 208 CEOs. He was again nominated among the ‘Ten Most Respected CEOs’ in Ghana in 2012, ranking 4th in that year. On December 4, 2010, he was awarded the ‘Millennium Excellence Award for Educational Development’. In 2014, he received the ‘Social Entrepreneur of the Year’ from the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship.
Patrick Awuah also served on the Advisory Committee on Voluntary Foreign Aid (ACVFA) of the U.S. Agency for International Development from 2010 to 2016. He is a Fellow of the Africa Leadership Initiative of the Aspen Global Leadership Network and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Similarly, he was nominated as a ‘Global Leader 2007’ by the World Economic Forum.
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Looking ahead, Awuah says, he hopes Africa’s universities will cultivate a new generation of bold and innovative leaders, helping the continent to transform itself.
