Teacher knew what she needed to do after driving past children

A Liverpool teacher said she had a “lump in her throat” when she drove past a group of children. Chiedza Jane Ikpeh, living in Knowsley, was visiting her husband Samuel’s family in Ghana when she said she had her “eyes opened”.

The 30-year-old spent 10 days at Easter in Accra, the capital of the West African country, on a trip she said she wouldn’t forget anytime soon. The PhD student said it was the economic poverty and disparities that stuck with her and urged her to try to make a change.

The University of Chester student told the ECHO: “For me, the most striking thing was the severity of the economic disparity in the whole continent. You are either super rich or super poor in these countries. There is no in-between, and essentially, that means you're either super privileged or super disadvantaged.

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“When we visited, it was painful because we automatically sat on one side of that spectrum. We really realised our privilege and how we have everything and more, and there are others who don’t even have the basics.

"Even just driving down the streets, we were driving past some beautiful neighbourhoods filled with children. You feel like you're in America, and yet one street over, and you are literally in the ghettos of society.

“I was in the car with a lump in my throat. It was really difficult. We enjoyed ourselves and toured the country, yet there were people who lived there and would never get to see its beauty.”

After arriving back on British soil, Chiedza knew she needed to do something through her education project, RARA. She reached out to organisations in similar fields as the CIC to check what work they were doing and how she could contribute to it.

Rather than starting a separate initiative, Chiedza is feeding into existing activities in collaboration with FEED, a Ghanaian non-profit organisation dedicated to enhancing opportunities for underserved children.

She is particularly looking at the four-week two-read programme, which is designed to rapidly transform non-readers into confident readers within a month. Chiedza’s goal is to sponsor the literacy training of 100 students by Easter 2025, providing them with the foundational skills needed for lifelong learning.

The activist said: “We aren’t going to save the whole of Ghana, just the two of us, but we knew we wanted to do a little thing that would contribute to giving someone else a chance. You don’t get to choose what household you're born into or what your postcode is. There are some children out there with no chance at all.”

To kickstart her fundraising efforts, Chiedza is taking part in Liverpool’s 10k run at Aintree on Sunday, December 15. You can donate to the GoFundMe for this here.