By Camille Smith | Program Assistant
Ashesi University in Ghana is committed to educating members of Africa's next generation of ethical, entrepreneurial leaders. Our alumni often go on to pursue projects with a profound impact on their communities, and many start to make their mark long before graduation. Members of the engineering department, which was inaugurated in 2015 thanks to donor support, are no different.
In spite of its young age, Ashesi's engineering program is already producing research whose impact extends far beyond Ashesi’s campus. In fact, on November 8th engineering professor Elena Rosca lead a team of eight Ashesi students to Boston to participate in the world's premier synthetic biology competition. This prestigious event, known as iGEM, had never before seen a team from Ghana participate, and Ashesi was one of only two teams from the African continent.
Team Ashesi's project centered on their development of a bacteria which can extract gold from soil and which will hopefully counteract the common and harmful practice in Ghana of using mercury for gold extraction. In spite of their lack of experience, and their competition against teams from some of the world's most prestigious institutions including Harvard, Oxford, and Cornell, Ashesi was awarded a silver medal for their work. You can read more here.
According to the iGEM team, they are driven by a desire to solve problems that impact their society, and this drive is apparent in their work. Thank you for supporting the next generation of ethical, entrepreneurial African engineers!
By Camille Smith | Program Assistant
By Alix Halloran | GlobalGiving Field Traveler
Project reports on GlobalGiving are posted directly to globalgiving.org by Project Leaders as they are completed, generally every 3-4 months. To protect the integrity of these documents, GlobalGiving does not alter them; therefore you may find some language or formatting issues.
If you donate to this project or have donated to this project, you can receive an email when this project posts a report. You can also subscribe for reports without donating.
Support this important cause by creating a personalized fundraising page.
Start a Fundraiser
