[music]
This year, we'll be running the fifth iteration of the
Yale Young African Scholars Program.
We run university guidance workshops for our students.
And so these are small groups that
are supervised by a current university student,
graduate or undergraduate student who's
been through the similar process of applying
to university, often on their own and without family,
or school, or administrative support.
So many young people are really keen for university,
particularly there.
And so many young people really lack the information that
helps them access university.
I remember a lot of the questions
that I had were regards to applying to college
and regards to transitioning to a country
that you've never even been to in the first place.
For me, there was a girl in high school
who had found her way to Yale.
So she sort of was recruiting me to join her here at Yale.
This is the moment to bring scholarship and teaching
about Africa at Yale into sharper focus.
When President Salovey took office as President,
he announced the Yale Africa initiative.
A small group of us gathered with brainstorming,
like what are the ways in which we could get involved.
So we decided that what we wanted to do
was to create awareness and sort of increase the knowledge base
for African students in making their decisions
to access university.
I believe to my very core that education is the number one
most powerful tool for community development
and for personal development.
And I think access to education is a human right
that too few people around the world enjoy.
I think one of the reasons that the Yale Young African Scholars
Program was able to jump off the way it did and to thrive
was because there was a community of people that
were committed to the cause.
For the last three years, which have been funded by Higher Life
Foundation and a generous gift from that organization,
our Yale students, who travel with us as instructors,
facilitate small discussion-based classes
that allow students to experience what it's
like to think critically in the classroom,
and to engage with material, and to engage with peers.
A really important part of the program
is that mentorship doesn't end when the program ends.
So each student is assigned a Yale student,
who is a mentor as they either go through the college
application process themselves or prepare to do it
in the next year or so.
I remember this student emailed me and he was
like this essay's due in 12 hours, could you look it over?
And I was like, yeah, I'll do it.
It was easier for me to be an instructor, just because I'd
been a student for the program.
So I was able to have all these special lunches
with the students.
And we would have this huge table with like 15 people,
and be able to address those issues that I knew people had,
and I knew that people were talking about.
Definitely made me closer to a lot of the participants
as well, and able to continue relationships even
after the program.
The program really fosters a sense
of confidence in students.
And it reinforces to students that they
have what it takes to be able to access, in this case,
education, university.
And that they can take control of that aspect of their lives.
Four people from my high school went
for the program, the Yale Young African Scholars Program,
and when we go back to my high school,
it was more of a conversation of, OK, guys,
it's more than Ghana, it's more than all these countries
that we have family in, like we can literally go anywhere.
People definitely started seeing the possibilities that
were available to them, which I think
was the biggest blessing for me.
We have grown greatly from a hundred participants
in two countries to 300 participants
in two countries this year.
We have students who are in their final year, students
who are in their second to last year, students who have just
started high school and were already thinking
about their next steps.
My father, he was very intrigued by how the Yale Young African
Scholars completely changed the trajectory of what
I wanted to do, who I wanted to be,
where I wanted to go to college.
A Yale degree or a Yale education
comes with a responsibility to your community
and to your country, or whatever community means to you.
The Yale Young African Scholars conversation
includes commitments to the community
that the students are from and commitment to the continent.
We really work to foster engagement in the community
and a sense of commitment and responsibility.
These students have shown me what
it means to be passionate about something
and what it means to want to change the world
that you occupy.
I took this one session with Nikolai.
It was called "Foreign Aid in Africa".
And it was looking at how Africa could
develop without foreign aid.
And for me, something just clicked in that session.
It also made me really more conscious about the issues
that Africa has and how it got to that point.
And now, that's actually what I want to do in the future,
like negotiate foreign aid policies.
And that's where my interest in that field started from.
But I highly doubt that at the time
she ever realized that she was igniting a passion that
would take me in all directions and literally
traveling all across the continent.
So, yeah, you never know the effect you're going to have.
It fills me with a lot of joy to see what that one week
does to a student's commitment to what they want to study
and what they want their impact to be for
the community and the continent.