SCHOOL TO STUDy

Changemaker: Prince Tardeh

Country of Implementation: Liberia

The only public study space in Buchanan, Liberia is operated by the American Corner of the US Embassy. Inaddition, a survey conducted by his non-profit - Widening Innovation for Sustainable Empowerment (WISE- Liberia) - among 280 students - found that 92.8% of the high school students in Buchanan do not own a computer and 78.4% of these students cannot operate a computer. Importantly, 99.3% of these students expressed high interest in acquiring computer literacy skills.

His project - ‘School to Study’ - is an extended version of some of the previous programs held by his non- profit organization. As the first nonprofit space for public use in Buchanan, ‘School to Study’ aims to facilitate active student collaboration, foster critical thinkers, and support student's academic and intellectual growth by providing students a quiet study space with access to one thousand textbooks (curriculum and non-curriculum-related) and computers to complete homework. It also aims to provide computer literacy skills to high school students to minimize the computer illiteracy rate among students in Buchanan, Liberia.

General participants of this program are high school students in Buchanan who signed up for two-hour slots to use the space to complete their homework and study during each school week. Specific participants of the computer literacy program are ten students recruited from an application pool of fifty students who are in the top 5% of their high school classes. These students will be tutored for three months as cohort two followed by the recruitment of a new cohort (cohort 3) by the end of the third month. Putting everything together, his project idea benefits over one hundred and fifty students (150) in Buchanan, Liberia.

More details about his previous work with his non-profit can be found here:

https://wiseliberia.wordpress.com/