HOUSTON — Each school year PrimeWay Federal Credit Union provides three college scholarships to Houston/Brenham area high school students. Additionally, one scholarship is guaranteed to a member of their Young Adult Members program.
Despite the anonymity on the entries for judges' review, for the past two years, Kojo Minta has received the PrimeWay Young Adult Members scholarship.
Minta stood out to the judges both years for not only his grades, but his commitment to his studies and the people and world in which we all live. While others were relaxing this summer, Minta was changing the lives of children halfway around the world.
Recommended For You
Currently attending the University of Pennsylvania, he organized the Gold Coast Fund with two friends, attending Duke University and West Point. Gold Coast's mission is to fund libraries in small West African villages. Minta was inspired to start the Gold Coast Fund while on a relief mission in Rwanda with Africa Christian Medical Missions, Inc. providing medicines and medical care to 802 children and 1,703 adults who would not have access to medical care without the Mission's volunteers. He found that many young people in their teens and 20s were thirsting for more knowledge, but had little to no access to resources that provide additional tools for learning.
This summer, Minta traveled to the village of Koniyaw in Ghana to set up the first library for the Gold Coast Fund. The library is based at Koniyaw Junior Secondary School, which has about 155 kids in three levels. The levels correspond roughly to the US middle school, so the students are between the ages of 12 and 14.
This first library consists of about 100 books. Minta receives donations of books and money from sponsors mostly in the United States, though he would like to recruit sponsors from the United Kingdom and Africa in the future. In the next two years, he says he would like to develop a library in Nigeria and eventually get computers and Internet access for the village libraries. This is currently a challenge because phone lines and other necessary equipment are only available in larger cities.
© Touchpoint Markets, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to [email protected]. For more inforrmation visit Asset & Logo Licensing.
