We met as colleagues in ´Haus Ruhrgarten´ , a retirement home. There we developped the desire to help together. Our club chairman Kofi Akoto was the first to bring us into contact with the topic poverty in Africa. He himself originates from the region Kumasi in Ghana. Since 2014, he has committed himself to bring material and food donations to the region Kumasi, but it was just not enough.
That was when we joined together as colleagues and thought about how to help more effectively. That is when the charity ´a smile for Ghana´ was founded in June 2015 by Eva Lendzion, Kofi Akoto, Heidi Krist, Mila Diener, Klaus Golombeck, Veronika Gumprecht and Carmen Janicke.
Our first commitment was taking over a sponsorship for ´the peace and love international school´. Hence, we wanted to support single mothers in this region in particular. We all work on a honorarly basis and every donation is directly transferred to Kumasi by Kofi Akoto. There it is deployed where it is most urgently needed.
Every year we initiate various campaigns to collect donations for our school children and to promote the expansion of the school. Our best known campaign is probably the yearly gospel concert, which is finally going to take place again this year after Corona.
The concert will be held this year on November 25th in the auditorium of the secundary school in Broich again. We hope to celebrate with you this year a wonderful evening with dance, music and acrobatics, whereby we are supported by many energetic students, colleagues and friends.
We are looking forward to a succesful evening and are grateful for any donation!
We truely believe that the structural difficulties in Kumasi can only be resolved by education. By supporting ´the love and peace International School´ we have made it our mission to create acces to schooling/education for children and in this case in particular for girls. We want to avoid girls being pushed to the edge of society and we support integration by education.
Schools are often run by private organizations, so because of the high costs poor people can not afford education for their children or the children have to drop out of school due to the lack of funds. This makes the gap even wider and the poor poorer.
Since the structure of the existing building keeps pushing us to our limits, we made the decision to build a new building that will accomodate 18 classes with 31 students each. This will finally offer the possibility to teach older students as well.
At the same time, thanks to your help, we have been able to buy a school bus, hire 5 teachers and a headmistress, and completely equipped some rooms in the old school building. A very big Thank You for that.
Furthermore, we take over the sponsorship for 20 children. That means payment of the school fees as well as 2 meals a day.
We also support single mothers. Girls often become pregnant at a young age and therefore live with limited financial resources. That’s why we support single mothers in the region Kumasi with donations in kind, such as clothing, toys and household appliances etc.
Our heart project is to support the “Peace and Love International School” in Kumasi, Ghana. Sofar there is a primary school with a capacity of 65 children, which we modernised as good as possible.
© 2024 Ein Lächeln für Ghana
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