Empower Higher Education for Scholars in Cameroon

Dear GlobalGiving Community,

For the past four months, part of our focus has been on building new partnerships. This was thanks to the credibility we have build over time, the impact we are creating on the ground and the potential of the human capital we are developing together. More specifically, we had the following new partnership engagements to promote our shared vision:

- Enko Education with the mission to increase access to the world's leading universities through high-quality international education, partnered with us to reach more high-achieving low income students in Cameroon for their scholarship scheme. The scholarship winners will enjoy mentorship from Open Dreams and Enko Education. This comes to add to other partnerships with the UREGA Foundation, the Jumbam Family Foundation and lots more with similar missions.

- We partnered with Hope for Cameroon (HfC), an International NGO led by Open Dreams Scholars and partners, to run our first Summer Academy in Douala, the Economic Capital of Cameroon. This program will target mostly the Internally Displaced Persons as a result of the ongoing war in parts of Cameroon.

- We partnerered with the Information and Communication Technology University (ICT-U) in Yaounde, Cameroon to work on supporting young creative minds as they work on tech startups (incubation). This partnership targets secondary/high schools and university students.

- We had a great engagement with the High Commission of the United Kingdom in Cameroon to foster climate action through our partner organization, Game Changers. We also discussed collaboration in many areas in line with the SDGs.

- We build more university partnerships and over 20 of our students have had scholarships thanks to such productive partnerships.

As we look forward to organizing our summer academy for the 2023, there are a lot more great things to write about, but for now, we just want to take a moment to thank you for your support over the years. We hope you continue to stand by us as we work on changing lives. Teamwork makes the dream work.

Best Regards,

Links:

• The Open Dreams 2022 Annual Review
• Pioneer Open Dreams PhD Scholar visits the OD Center
• Climate Action led by our scholars

December 2022 marked a high moment for the Open Dreams Community. More than ever before, several Open Dreams Scholars from abroad and partner organizations joined the Open Dreams Community in Cameroon to mark the Aviva Day in 9 hospitals in 7 locations in Cameroon, spending in all over $4,800 on cash gifts and items for families of Children born with congenital defects who tend to stay longer at the neonatology units of the hospitals. Through the Aviva Day, Open Dreams Scholars cultivate the spirit of love for and giving back to the Community. The 2022 Aviva Day also saw the institution of the first Aviva Scholar by the Director of the North West Regional Hospital in Bamenda - Cameroon. The Aviva Scholar is expected to carry out research in neonatal mortality in a bid to contribute to promote human development. More information is available here -  https://www.open-dreams.org/projects-2.

In the same month of December 2022, University Early Admission Decisions were released. Like never before, we had students admitted into 4 Ivy League Universities in the USA and more admitted into top universities in the USA and other countries in the World. This indeed was remarkable.

Our 2022 Summer Academy ran in Bamenda - Cameroon and Yaounde Cameroon with our centers exploding with several program facilitators introducing very new areas of studies among them financial literacy. For the first time, we also rolled out our digital learning platform, Project Moon. As one of our peak moments in the summer, we won the Rising Star Award at the International ACAC conference at the University of New Mexico. This year, we have strengthened our graduate mentorship group, running more mentorship webinars than ever before. We also have more institutions partnering with us to promote access to education - one of our biggest partners through the HALI Access Network is the Rise Program which focuses on promising leaders between the ages of 15-17, who can potentially address some of the world's greatest and emerging challenges. Through these partnerships and our growing engagements, we are now able to support more students and work with more institutions in Cameroon; We now own more technological devices as well. As we move into our next decade of operations, we hope to expand our capacity through establishing more facilities of our own among them infrastruture. We are so grateful for your support this far. Hopefully, we continue to have more support so together we can do more. Team work makes the dream work.

Thank you for your support. We wish you the very best for the season.

Happy 2023.

Links:

• The Aviva Women in Science Fund
• Christmas Celebration at the Bamenda Regional Hospital -Cameroon

Hello Team,

Each day of this quarter of the year has been one of celebration. The foundation we have laid over the years and the financial investment are now paying back in several folds.

Last summer alone;

- 43 Open Dreams Pre-scholars successfully completed a costly month-long Summer Academy in two cities of Cameroon - Bamenda and Yaounde. Videos of thier ceremonial moments are attached.

- 202 Pre-scholars have signed up for the online mentorship program - we are proceeding with a new platform, Project Moon to provide more tech-based mentorship;

- More than 30 members of our community spend the summer participating in internship programs abroad;

- So far, slightly above 20 Open Dreams Scholars have travelled already on fresh scholarships this year;

- We have been involved several community-based programs which empower refugees;

- We have increased the number of laptops at the Open Dreams Center and are looking forward to expanding our operations in Bamenda where we scaled down due to the war;

- We are covering the cost of SAT for over 15 Pre-scholars who are IDPs, High-Achieving Low-Income students;

- We have directly supported several scholars who scholarships but needed to establish passports, pay sevis fee, interview and visa fee, covid-19 test, buy fly tickets, pay for insurance and ground movement;

- We continue to host scholars all the time at our center in Yaounde and provide for them daily;

- We have expanded our program to provide mentorship to students who have French as their first language and those who have the GCE Ordinary Level - this has added over 150 more people into our mentorship community.

These are some of the many engagements we are into. It is thanks to you support that we are building community resilience and assisting in the realization of many dreams.

We hope, as the results are visible, we will continiue to do more together.

Links:

• Matriculation of the Batch of Valiancy, Summer 2022 Cohort
• Graduation Ceremony, Open Dreams Summer Academy Bamenda 2022

It is always a great delight to report back to those who believe in and support us; those who, through their donations, make our field work possible.

While the challenges of 2021 were incredibly overwhelming due to the covid-19 pandemic and total disruption in travel, Our scholars and team members dedicated more time to intensive work, thanks to the emergence of technology to support remote working and networking. We have been able to build more partnerships with institutions like CORE Africa (www.coreafrica.org), the UREGA Foundation (urega.org), Ashesi University and the Ashinaga Africa Program which permits Japanese Students to take internship programs in Cameroon during the summer. Within Cameroon, we have fortified our engagements and collaboration with the Ministries in charge of Education and Universities which shall ease the mentorship process for promising graduates who demonstrate leadership and civic engagment. Above all, our flagship program, the Aviva Women in Science Fund promotes university research work in the area of supporting maternal and child health.

For the first time, we are expanding our mentorship program to accomodate french-speaking students and refugees, following requirements form partner institutions which support these students though new opportunities.

Also for the first time, a grant from the US Embassy Yaounde permitted us to work with 150 secondary education teachers on the use of instructional technology, strengthening their capacity to deliver lessons online. This initiative also empowers the teachers to support our scholars adequately in the field.

We have already launched our Summer Academy Applications and are looking forward to taking twice the number of pre-scholars we take yearly. One of the most exciting things this year is that there shall be an online mentorship platform, Project Moon, accessible to all deserving students anywhere on the globe. It's been months of weekly meeting making these plans to come to reality.

We also celebrate a record number of admissions of our scholars to Ivy League Universities from Havard to Standford to Oxford to Dartmouth etc at both the graduate and undergraduate level on full funding.

Currently, we have our scholars reaching out in the field and inspiring the community in the pursuit of academic excellence and community engagement. we also actively participate in community events and continue to grow our capacity to hold scholars together - for team work makes the dream work. We are reaching new frontiers and creating pathways for more people to pursue their dreams. We currently run an increasingly well-structured mentorship for graduate students, and at the moment a weeklong mentorship program is running for those applying for the Fulbright Scholarship Programs, with topnotch academics delivering quality mentorship across the board. Within Cameroon, we are proud to be one of the leading mentorship organizations.

We are incredily happy that together, we are achieving all of these. We look forward to more engagments

It's another great opportunity to reach out with words of thanks to you all who make our work possible through donations. Last summer was extra-ordinary; not only did we have more experts participating in our summer academy - we also did the best selection of students, refined the curriculum and re-started our program in Bamenda, Cameroon, a zone we had left in hibernation due to the armed struggle that had rocked the region since late 2016. In total, 50 young Cameroonians at the level of the high school benefitted from the very intensive summer training program, which ran programs from entrepreneurial leadership to community volunteering and technological solutions challenge (hackathons). Today, most of the scholars are engaged in their applications to college while a handful of that number already got full scholarships to top universities within Africa and the rest of the world.

During the summer, there were several community-immersion programs during which Open Dreams Scholars had a chance to volunteer while honing their leadership skills.

Particularly;

- alongside "Game Changers", a community-based organization, they took part in "Climate Action" activities which involved planting trees, cleaning up the communities and carrying out education on the preservation of the environment;

- they took part in a Technology Innovation Challenge, which brought together young tech geniuses from across Cameroon to pitch their startups, learn how to upgrade their prototypes etc. They also enrolled into a tech mentorship program that is planned to run for years;

- they organized, for university students, a tech competition titled "PremierDev Technology Solution Challenge". This challenge entailed exposing technology solutions they had designed to tackle local community challenges. Several groups of students from universities across the country participated. A 6 week boot camp later followed. This is one of the independent initiatives led by Open Dreams Scholars, who have benefit from leadership opportunities offered by the Open Dreams mentorship program;

- Open Dreams Scholars reached out with assistance in books and handouts to internally displaced students within the country, encouraging them to return to school. This operation was conducted in three regions in Cameroon, with over 300 students benefitting from enough material to go to school for a whole academic year.

- Open Dreams Scholars organized 3 week skills-development programs to 150 internally displaced young females, empowering them to engage in socio-economic activities which keep them safe and less vulnerable to exploitation from the society.

- we had partnerships with new institutions among them the Ashinaga Africa Initiative and most recently 'special consultative status’ with the UN's Economic and Social Council.

- we support and continue to support more dreamers by hosting them in our Yaoundé center, where we provide safe spaces for them to continue to pursue their dreams. We pay particular attention to young girls who have been excelling at Open Dreams, and doing exceedingly well in the STEM programs.

We have conquered new grounds, with scholars going into universities we had no scholars there before. More graduate scholars are getting great opportunities – medical doctors are leading in this professional development endeavor.

This December, we plan to re-organize Open Dreams to create more room for committees in which scholars put their leadership to work through volunteering. We continue to seek more funding for our growing programs and outreach which has seen greater community dependence on our programs. Thank you all for making the work possible through your generous donations, for which we are extremely grateful. We are truly indebted to you. We hope to continue to cover more grounds. Thank you for your unrelenting support. Together, we broaden our support base, as we continue our mission to equalize access to educational opportunities for community impact