Alfalit International has stepped up to another plate of youth empowerment by contracting young college students into its student volunteer program, the local office disclosed in the Liberian capital, Monrovia on Wednesday.
For its educational assistance program, which runs under the canopy of the Liberia-Ghana Missions, Alfalit Liberia recruited the first batch of 17 university and college students.
They will conduct a rigorous exercise of gathering data and validating the presence of more than 4000 grade school students in 43 schools in six counties, a press statement from Alfalit Liberia has said.
The Executive Director of Alfalit Liberia, Rev. Emmanuel Giddings on Monday, February 4, cautioned the student volunteers to be professional, transparent, committed to working with the schools for quality results satisfactory by donor’s standards.
“We are trying to not only sponsor your college education, but also to expose you to work culture, which is all by itself a gap among young Liberians,” Rev. Giddings told the student volunteers, who are themselves beneficiaries of the Liberia-Ghana Missions (L-GM) Educational Assistance Program.
The Liberia-Ghana Missions is a non-profit human resource development Christian charity. It was established in 2003 by a United Methodist minister, Rev. Emmanuel J. Giddings on the soil of Ghana. It provided educational assistance to about 300 Liberian refugees’ children at the Buduburam Refugee Camp as well as Ghanaian children.
The L-GM Program Office said the student volunteers are recruited from the United Methodist University, AME University, Monrovia Bible College, and Starz College of Science and Technology and they will work for a maximum period of 30 days.
Some are assigned as data entry clerks while others are engaged in data collections from students and their parents.
L-GM Program Supervisor George Stewart told our reporter that Alfalit Liberia is upgrading its educational assistance program while engaging in quality standards and increasing the credibility of its data collection and impact measurement.
“Our program is overwhelmed by its size and the influx of request from individuals and institutions that need our help. The needs are there but our office has to remain sensitive to impact measurement from direct beneficiaries”, Stewart said. He revealed that L-GM is interested as usual to pay tuition to schools for students in the school without any condition attached. “We need to make sure that the direct beneficiaries are impacted by our assistance,” Mr. Stewart maintained.
The Liberia-Ghana Missions is funded by Alfalit International in the USA by means of funding from Dr. Joseph Milton, the President of Alfalit International, who was once awarded an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters Degree by the United Methodist University in Liberia.
According to Alfalit Liberia, he’s profoundly committed to Liberia by visiting and touching the lives of grassroots communities that Alfalit Liberia covers with its literacy, job skills and educational assistance program.
He last visited Liberia in October 2018 and openly praised the impact of the literacy program as the best under his sponsorship in the world.
L-GM serves mostly underprivileged, vulnerable children and students who suffer the disadvantage of poverty and limited family support to fund their education. L-GM’s intervention extends to individuals, schools that cater to students in very poor communities, as well as promising school going children and youths who lack opportunity of continuing their education.
Each year L-GM sponsors over 6, 000 students in more than 500 grade schools, and sponsored students in nearly every university, colleges, technical and vocational institutions, according to the Alfalit Liberia.