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Josephine Marie Godwyll knew that young children in Ghana were not getting the education they deserved. Due to the challenges children faced in rural communities in Ghana, Josephine decided to start her own high impact social enterprise known as Young At Heart Ghana.
Learning can be fun or boring depending on how the message is delivered. The whole point of Young at Heart Ghana was to create a fun learning experience for Ghanaian children. In just four years they have already reached out to over 5000 children since 2013 just by the use of technology. The organization has created learning clubs that help children learn about technology in an interactive way. The program gives young children digital literacy skills and urge them to use those skills for all other subjects. For most children subjects such as science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics is already a challenge in itself, to deal with this problem they created an app known as S.T.E.A.M app which runs on android phones and web platforms. The app was made to suit Ghanaian children which is filled with local content which then makes it interesting for children when it comes to studying.
Although Josephine is a Geomatic engineer by profession she noted that she was limited whenever she worked in rural communities because people didn’t know how to use technology.
As she was creating a Geographical Information System for a rural area she had a lot of issues working with the people there because they only knew ICT from a theoretical point of view. Her biggest challenge at the time became her inspiration, she became a teacher after that and began her empowering program them. She realized that the children learnt faster because of the digital platforms that they got and because it was practical which made it fun. She also created an app for teaching the children known as Ananse The Teacher App.
She has big dreams for her company.
For Josephine her dream has been to start a mobile laboratory project. This will comprise a mobile cart that visits rural schools, giving students the opportunity to engage in reading clinics and do basic experiments. The cart will have mobile phones with Ananse The Teacher App, laptops and everyday materials with which they can engage in S.T.E.A.M inspired experiments. They also plan to launching an e-learning app that can be used all over the world. The learning experience will be different as they use heroes and stories depending on the country so that students can easily relate.
