Ashesi cultivates in its students the spirit of care and giving, often demonstrated in volunteering. As part of Ashesi’s liberal arts core curriculum students complete a four-semester series leadership course with a culminating exercise exploring and implementing leadership as service. Students are expected to volunteer to serve a community of their choice where they put into practice their emerging leadership identity, nascent skill in leading others and practice leading within the confines of societal and economic systems. Students who do not volunteer to serve in a community do not meet a graduation requirement. Consequently, every Ashesi student on the trajectory to graduate identifies a community need and works independently or with other Ashesi students in a team, to collaborate with the community members to solve or mitigate a community challenge. Examples of problems Ashesi student volunteers have tackled in various communities can be found here.
NGOs by default focus on at least one SDG, and when Ashesi collaborates with them, the university broadens its impact on meeting the SDG goals. Furthermore, Ashesi University helps its members find themselves and foster their strengths. One example is how Ashesi continues to support and collaborate with an NGO founded by one of its fulltime engineering faculty members, Dr Heather Beem. Her NGO program “PEN” (Practical Education Network) is focused on improving student learning outcomes of science through efficient and practical training of middle and high school science teachers, in Ghana and other African countries. PEN’s mission is to provide resources and capacity building support to STEM teachers to improve learning outcomes of the students they serve. PEN hosts teacher training workshops that teach secondary teachers in Ghana how to create hands-on STEM teaching materials for practicals using locally available materials. The teachers are expected to train other teachers in their schools, resulting in a cascading effect, which helps the teachers better educate their students.
Ashesi and PEN’s partnership was sparked in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic which forced many, if not all, interactions to take place online. Because PEN focuses on hands-on and experiential training, hosting online classes wasn’t in their foreseeable future. However, with funding from Ashesi’s faculty resources and with the help of the EC, Ashesi’s Educational Collaborative unit, PEN developed several online modules and workshops, and even kickstarted the financial empowerment of the teachers to train other teachers. Thus far, PEN has trained over 3,300 teachers on hands-on STEM activities. More about their impact can be found here.
Ashesi has been teaching-focused from its inception to date, and is currently moving towards strengthening its research. Student research, immediate – alumni are being hired as research interns, and funding is actively sought to support scholarship. Some faculty have established research labs, e.g., AREL , Ashesi Research and Education Lab
