The Journey thus far

Kwame Owusu-Ansah graduated from KNUST in 2015 with a degree in civil engineering, right as Ghana's economy tightened and long-term jobs got hard to find. What kept him working was something he'd picked up on the side as a young man: web design, programming, and computer-aided design.

Those side skills carried him through freelance and short-term contracts in ports and harbors, mining, construction, and NGO work across the country. He earned his engineering license, joined the Ghana Institution of Engineering, and later became a PMI-certified Project Management Professional (PMP), but the work that stuck with him most was using what he had, his time and his God-given abilities, to meet someone else's real need. That's what he wanted to build his life around.

A partnership through the UrbanPromise International Fellowship gave him the chance to train inside a nonprofit while he earned a Master's in Organizational Development from Cairn University in Pennsylvania. That fellowship is why ThriveWorks Ghana is UrbanPromise International's affiliate in Ghana today, part of a network now active in 11 countries. With a small team on the ground and a handful of advisors behind them, ThriveWorks Ghana started as an idea in 2021, and after two years of testing what actually worked, became an official nonprofit in January 2023.

We're still learning as we go. Every program here has been shaped by what our beneficiaries actually needed, not by what looked good on paper.