Monrovia – The Senior Political Officer of the United States Embassy near Monrovia will on Thursday, April 18, 2019, serve as a Guest Speaker at program marking the observance of the 24th Gala Anniversary of the New Hope Academy, a subsidiary education pilot project of the Better Future Foundation (BFF).
Ms. Kari Jaksa, who holds a Master’s degree in International Economics and African Studies from Johns Hopkins University, has been formally invited by the school administration in anticipation of lecturing on her personal life story, including challenges and encounters she had endured in excelling to her current international portfolio that aspiring Liberian youth and students, especially adolescent girls can learn from to succeed in their academic and professional sojourn.
Before joining the United States Foreign Service, Ms. Jaksa served as a Fulbright-Hays Swahili Scholar in Arusha, Tanzania. She is the co-editor of Outsmarting Apartheid: An Oral History of South Africa’s Cultural and Educational Exchange with the United States, 1960-1999.
The anniversary will be held on the Peace Island/Jacob Town campus of the NHA which runs from Kindergarten to Grade 12 with current enrollment of more than 500 students.
According to BFF’s Founder, Augustine Arkoi, NHA provides affordable learning opportunity to all, and scholarships particularly for orphans and disadvantaged out of school youth in Jacob Town and its environs.
The release added that girls’ education, retention in school, leadership, and issues of their sexual reproductive health are at the core of BFF’s programs and services being offered at the New Hope Academy.
“Currently, NHA is witnessing an increment in girls’ enrolment over boys in most of its classrooms, especially at the senior high level.
The New Hope Academy first started in 1995, as a community re-creation center in a makeshift building, teaching only martial art and life skills to about 40 community based adolescent youth during the difficult era of the Liberian civil war.
According to the release, the shocking discovery at the time that majority of said youth had never sat in classroom, prompted the proprietor to have acquired an official permit from the Ministry of Education, thus transforming the re-creation center into a formal academic school.
