A USA-based nonprofit organization, the Joseph & Elizabeth Quansah (JEQ) Foundation, has presented new laptops to selected Foundation’s Ghanaian college/university scholarship recipients.
Speaking at the ceremony, the Co-Founder/Co-President of the Foundation Prof. Joseph Emmanuel Quansah, said the Foundation was set up with the wife to support especially excellent but needy students in Ghana to ensure that they have at least a basic first degree.
“Our hope and ultimate goal is to support as many Ghanaian students as possible in order to provide them the opportunity of having a good first degree. This will require resources and we would love to have corporate bodies to partner with the JEQ Foundation to provide academic and educational opportunities for students, especially Ghanaian students who are excellent and smart,” he said.
The presentation was made by representatives of the Foundation in Ghana, with the attendance of some of the current and past recipients of the Foundation’s scholarships.
The JEQ foundation was founded in 2019 in the USA to support Ghanaian students who excel academically but lack financial resources to enroll in tertiary education by providing full tuition/residential scholarships to cover all years of a recipient’s academic program, and laptops to selected students who have gained admission to undergraduate programmes in public or private educational institutions.
In addition to the financial support, the foundation provides academic advising, mentorship, and internship opportunities for scholarship recipients.
“We make sure we provide academic advising to all our scholars, we provide mentorship and also provide internships to enable our scholars to have the needed industrial experiences even before they complete their degree programs” Prof. Quansah said.
“What we’ve done or what we hope to do is that through this partnership, we’ll have our students, who mostly would graduate top in their classes, be able to have internships with these industries. Moreover, this creates a pipeline from college to industry. Partner industries get the opportunity to meet these students during the internship period. They get to know those who are good, and they can recruit them, making it a win-win situation,” he added.
The foundation encourages recipients to be socially responsible by asking them to perform any kind of community service at least 15 hours a year while under scholarship and to give back in the future by supporting other excellent students when they become gainfully employed,
The Foundation in 2022 offered 21 full tuition and housing scholarships.
Overall, the foundation from 2020 to date has awarded 43 individual tuition/housing scholarships and presented new laptops to deserving students.
Over 50% of all scholarship recipients have received new laptops based on their continued academic excellence and community service.
JEQ Foundation’s scholarship recipients are in universities and colleges all over Ghana, including
Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, University of Ghana, University of Cape Coast, University of Development Studies (UDS), and Takoradi Technical University (TTU), among others.
Some of the collaborators of the JEQ Foundation are Adumoss Engineering Ghana and MOBA80 USA.
“We have an MOU and a partnership with Adumoss Engineering Company, who for instance, sponsor two of our students, so we use this as an opportunity to also request partnership with local companies and local institutions to support what we do in order for us to support our youth and educate the next generation of Ghanaians.”
A beneficiary Abdul Rahaman Lansah of the University of Development Studies expressed appreciation to JEQ Foundation on behalf of his colleague recipients for their support.
