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A new generation of women in Ghana in Ghana with Legacy Girls College
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Located in Akuse, in the Eastern Region of Ghana, Legacy Girls’ College provides quality and affordable education to 400 girl students. From 2015, the school is looking to form a new generation of Ghanaian women with core values like Integrity, Responsibility and Excellence. To finance its expansion, Legacy Girls’ College is supported by Oasis African Fund, in which the FISEA fund, managed by Proparco, has invested.
A red shirt and blue skirt. At Legacy Girls’ College, students are required to wear a uniform, which is also the case in most schools in Ghana. Except that this dress code is only respected here by schoolgirls. Indeed, this private school is one of the very few that only receives girls in this English-speaking West African country with 30 million inhabitants.
There are just over 400 students – supervised by about sixty teachers and service staff – following a high-quality education, supported by a strong educational project that aims to train a new generation of women.
“A generation of women who have a thirst for leadership and do not apologize for being women, but understand that they have a role to play in society.”
Strong values and reduced tuition fees
In both the school corridors and large inner courtyard, there are signs to remind students of the “five core values” of this educational project: integrity, responsibility, excellence, ambition and determination...
“Our mission is to train ethical women, able to have a positive impact on the development of our society and leave a legacy for future generations”, adds Ellen Hagan, Head of this school which offers both the Ghanaian curriculum and British curriculum and supports its students up to their high school diploma.
This is an opportunity in a country where only 9% of schoolgirls went to private secondary schools in 2015.
Wilfried Antoine Desveaux (WAD Photographies pour Proparco)
The school charges reduced tuition fees – three times lower than other equivalent schools in Ghana on average – and has seen a leap in its student numbers in the past 4 years, from 13 students to over 400 today. “I wanted to go to Legacy Girls’ College because for me, it’s an institution with a strong foundation”, says one of them, who is pleased to receive “core and high-quality values” at the school.
Support from Oasis Africa Fund
To support its expansion, the school is continuously recruiting qualified staff and is building an extension comprising classrooms with computer equipment, dormitories and new recreational areas. Several buildings are nearing completion at the school.
To reduce its energy consumption, the school is also going to be fitted with solar panels. Finally, new software to improve the follow-up of lessons is going to be installed soon and provided to students.
“We’ve developed very quickly”, says Ellen Hagan. “We needed to build all these facilities and ensure we had good teachers”.
Wilfried Antoine Desveaux (WAD Photographies pour Proparco)
To finance this development program, the school received a USD 3.3m investment from the Oasis Africa Fund (OAF), which makes equity and quasi-equity investments in SMEs with strong growth potential in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire. “It’s very clear that without OAF, we wouldn’t be where we are today”, says the Head of the school.
Long-term commitment
In 2016, the FISEA fund, which is managed by PROPARCO, invested USD 7m in the Oasis Africa Fund (OAF) and made a USD 500,000 technical assistance budget available, which Legacy Girls’ College has also benefited from.
“One of the biggest commercial challenges in Ghana has been the lack of long-term financing and financing at a reasonable price”, says Matthew Baodu Adjei, CEO of OAF.
Even today, “Almost all the financing in Ghana is very short-term, with very high interest rates. It’s probably one of the countries in the world with the highest interest rates”.
As with all the projects it supports, OAF has developed a model for Legacy Girls’ College that allows it to ensure there is a long-term commitment and development.
Wilfried Antoine Desveaux (WAD Photographies pour Proparco)
Report
In the field, in Akuze. A visit to Legacy Girls’ College, which offers high-quality education to over 400 schoolgirls, based on an educational project that promotes five core values (integrity, responsibility, excellence, ambition and determination), presented by Ellen Hagan, Head and co-founder of the school.