Patrick Awuah is the founder and president of Ashesi University in Accra, Ghana, a private not-for-profit institution that has gained a reputation as one of Africa’s finest institutions of higher learning. The school focuses on training future leaders with an approach that weaves entrepreneurship, technology and engineering, ethics and critical thinking. The school’s name means “beginning”
in Fante, a native Ghanaian language. Before founding Ashesi in 2002, Awuah studied at Swarthmore College and at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business in the United States, and then worked on Internet technologies at Microsoft in the 1990s. He has won many prestigious awards including, in 2017, the WISE Prize, one of
the world’s biggest prizes in education, and earlier a MacArthur Fellowship.