Having just quit a highly lucrative job with tech giant Microsoft in the United States, where he’d made millions working as a program manager, Patrick Awuah would wake up once in a while wondering if he’d done the right thing.
“And then I read the words of Goethe,” remembers Awuah: “Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it — begin it now.”
What Awuah wanted to begin was to create a university in his native Ghana, a state-of-the-art education hub that would help educate the country’s next generation of leaders.
Inspired by the saying of the famous German writer, Awuah moved with his family back to Ghana. There, he invested his own money and with the help of other donors he founded Ashesi University.
Located about an hour’s drive from the capital Accra, Ashesi, which appropriately translates to “beginning,” is the first Ghanaian university to combine technical majors with a liberal arts approach.
Its vibrant campus, set on 100 acres in a town called Berekuso, was designed to be inspiring for the more than 500 young Ghanaians studying there.
