Sage Experience

I aim to rebuild a global meritocracy so even young people from rural Ghana and other parts of Africa have the knowledge, skills, resources, and connections to become leaders that transform our region. Today, I pair paying students from around the world with young Ghanaians with few material resources but tremendous energy and desire for change. With the Elevate Prize I will use 25% of it to triple our cohort size by investing in growing our recruitment pipeline of young leaders; hire and train mentors; and secure facilities for satellite locations. I will invest 50% of it in building out our leadership competencies credential, through marketing it to employers and universities broadly and by partnering with local employers and organizations to train and credential their team members. To bolster the legitimacy of our credential and programming, I aim to simultaneously invest in efforts to leverage our alumni network to showcase the influence of the young leaders we have trained, provide grants for promising graduates to learn technical skills and setup their own projects using the skills they learn with us. With the remaining 25% I will invest in developing an online project-based LMS to train and connect young leaders globally.

My parents sent me to the city at age six for an education. Instead, I worked on construction sites to survive, until at twelve I started school, witnessing foreign volunteer teachers cycle in and out, unintentionally reminding us of our poverty, and promising help that rarely came. Although few stayed long enough to be effective teachers, they instilled a desire to prove I am equally capable. When school let out, I would work manual jobs until dark to have food to eat, and then return to school to study independently using the solar light. With a former teacher's support, I attended high school and my desire to serve others led me to become the unofficial school nurse, attending to 1000 students' healthcare while pursuing my studies. Learning leadership by doing, I tapped the potential in us, the forgotten youth. Even with a scholarship allowing me to attend UC Davis, my visa was denied. Determined to transform my community, I decided if I could not go to college, I would bring college to us. Using my years in construction, I built an educational centre so students from Ghana and the world can learn leadership and live as equals through real-world projects.

Ghana’s 17+ million students learn content determined by foreign aid consultants, disconnected from our lived experiences. Our 28,000+ schools teach stale material so we learn to be quiet and obedient. School has failed to equip millions of Ghanaians with the skills that can transform our lives and communities. 

Sage facilitates immersive experiences for youth to develop the skills to address real issues with a fully hands-on curriculum. Supported by a project management mentor and a personal skills coach, Sage students use design thinking to develop and implement solutions to actual challenges faced in our communities. From empathy to project management, students gain a full toolkit of Sage power skills from communications and negotiations to planning and budgeting. 

By bringing together young people from Ghana and globally with a pedagogy that balances power dynamics for learning from each other’s diverse experiences. Our curriculum motivates students as they see the tangible benefits of their efforts. Our communities witness the power of our youth instead of waiting for aid workers and foreign volunteers. Our elders see that we can be leaders, but we need to start developing the next generation early to be leaders so they have the fluency to enact change effectively.

We take a unique approach to youth leadership development by focusing on combining cross-cultural teaming with design thinking and real-world projects. We flip the typical model of project-based learning whereby students learn with contrived projects, and rather our students take on urgent challenges our local communities face. Rather than looking for magical approaches for sustainability or scalability, we look to train young people with the local knowledge, energy, and commitment to solve their local issues. 

Too often youth leadership programs stay in the realm of theory rather than practice. Our research on youth leadership shows that the main barriers to success is rooted in the lack of confidence to come up with and share a big vision, and the strategies to build a coalition to implement the solution.  By bringing together young people from Ghana and other countries to take on a real-world challenge in practice and not just on paper, our students build the confidence and practice building the coalitions needed to achieve real change. Through our careful curriculum, our Ghanaian youth see they have the same potential as their foreign collaborators. The cross-cultural collaboration yields powerful insights and an investment of resources and strengths each uniquely offers.

My country, Ghana, like many developing nations, needs leadership that represents not just the elite, but those of us who grow up at the bottom of society. We treat all young people, even those of us who have been ignored and forgotten, as active contributors to our communities. Because of Sage, our youth achieve real impact to prove to our neighbors and elders the talent they have right here in our own communities. 

We have facilitated student projects grounded in the needs of our communities. Our students have organized rural science fairs mentored by MIT students and alumni alongside young Ghanaians and chiefs from rural villages. Others have established a mobile library that provides a rotational distribution network for literacy materials, avoiding the issues of centralized libraries that too often get locked up and left unused. Other students have worked on clean water access to construction of low-cost wind energy turbines. 

Sage’s secret is providing the physical and emotional space that brings together elite students globally as equals to our local youth. Our high-touch model unleashes the talents of the forgotten by giving them world class mentors and peers in a setting that inspires urgent action not just academic talk.