The United Bank for Africa (UBA) Foundation, the organisers of the UBA Essay Writing Competition has awarded the three winners out of the of National Essay Writing Competition with US$10,000 educational grant and other awesome prizes.
This, according to the Deputy Managing Director of UBA, Sylvia Inkoom, forms part of measures by the bank to support education and see it thrive in all the African countries that the bank has been established.
“The primary believe of the chairman for the bank is that to empower Africans economically, you need to empower them educationally first, so every year the group set aside some significant amount of money and this goes into different forms of the educational sector,” she said.
Ms. Inkoom stated that the significant amount of money set aside for promoting education across African countries are applied in diverse ways within the educational sector indicating that “we in Ghana have chosen to do the essay competition for secondary schools, we believe that is the stage where critical thinking about the issues that affects society and their everyday life begins.
And we believe that when we do, we will be equipping them with what we call future ready skills, so that they can finish school, get jobs or create their own Jobs, that’s why we do this annually.”
Ms. Inkoom expressed her worry over participation of the competition by only a few schools over the years but was very hopeful due to a little increase in terms of this year’s competition, stating that it is a national completion, hence it must involve all regions across the country.
“I am very excited that this year, we were able to have representation from other regions and we haven’t had that in the past and even though we call it a national essay competition, it has been predominantly an Accra based competition,” she said.
As part of measures to increase the number of participating schools, lot of marketing was done last year and Ghana Education Service (GES) also contributed through sending of memos to Senor High Schools, urging them to participate in the competition.
Stressing on her strong desire to make every SHS participate she said: “until we get a full national participation, we will not relent. We have seen an uptake and we look forward to a much more participation from the Northern, Volta and other regions, so we are putting a lot of work in marketing and publicity, we want to hear from them all.”
The 2021 version of the essay writing gathered about 300 SHS students, which saw 10 of them making it to the finals. Yohunor Amanor of Ghana Senior High School emerged the overall winner to take home the US$5,000 ultimate prize together with certificate, laptop and other souvenirs.
Michael Kissi Asrifi and Ayishatu Adamu were the 1st and 2nd runner up respectively, with Michael receiving US$3,000 and Ayishatu taking US$2,000 plus laptop and other prizes. The student expressed their joy and promised to make impact with the support given them by the bank.
