ZEN Petroleum has announced a partnership with Teach for Ghana (TFG), aimed at improving education in various parts of the country and impacting students’ educational outcomes.

This partnership will be the focus of the company’s ‘ZEN to Community’ (Z2C) social intervention programmes for 2019.

TFG was founded in 2013, with the vision that one day; all children in Ghana will have access to an excellent education. Led by Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, Daniel Dotse, TFG is headquartered in Accra, currently active in the Northern and Volta regions, and aims to expand to all Regions by 2022.

They operate by recruiting Ghana’s best and brightest recent university graduates and young professionals to teach Science, Mathematics, Information Technology, and English, in low-income communities in Ghana through a 2-year leadership development fellowship.

The Fellows then become part of a network of outstanding leaders bound by a common experience of teaching in low-income communities and driven by a shared purpose of eliminating educational inequity in Ghana.

ZEN will support this vision by donating a pesewa per litre of retail volumes to TFG, which took effect from September 2018.

To support the NPO’s initiatives in 2019, ZEN has also made a donation of $50,000 (approximately GH¢260,000.00) to the TFG.  

ZEN’s support will be crucial in supporting TFG address key issues such as findings from the Center for Universal Education of Brookings, based on data from multiple regional and national assessments which revealed that, 21.1% of Ghanaian school children are not effectively learning reading and 43.1% are not effectively learning maths.

Commenting on the partnership, ZEN HR Director, Kwabena Yeboah, noted that “we are inundated with several requests to sponsor many worthy social causes, and it is always a challenge trying to balance our instinctive desire to assist with the need to exercise due diligence and a contribution that makes the best possible impact.

We are excited to have finally settled on a partner who already has a great and verifiable track record in their field. Education has always been important to us, and TFG offers us an opportunity to work with some of the brightest young people in Ghana to impact many others, the ZEN Way.”

ZEN has been involved with other education-related CSR activities such as the annual ZEN/Newmont Ahafo Development Fund (ZEN/NADeF) Scholarship to support highly-driven and brilliant undergraduates within ten communities in the Asufiti North and Tano North districts of the Brong Ahafo region, and more recently, the Resettlement Library and ICT Centre at Ayanfuri in the Western Region.

More information on the ZEN/TFG partnership, including a video interview by William Tewiah (MD ZEN Petroleum), can be found at teachforghana.org.