After graduating, Ibrahim is now heading home on his first mission as a change-maker
Ibrahim Kondeh was born in Kangama village, Sierra Leone. He arrived in Italy four years ago as an unaccompanied minor and lived in refugee camps until 2019 when he passed the Italian UWC selections and obtained a Never Alone scholarship to attend UWC Adriatic. He is therefore part of the the Graduating Class of 2021 at our college.
Even before UWC, Ibrahim was involved in advocacy for less fortunate people, particularly unaccompanied migrant children and refugees and asylum-seekers living in Italy. As he was going through his second year at UWC Adriatic, he acutely felt the need do something to bring about change to the people he had left back home: “All of a sudden, in Duino I realized that the problems our communities are facing cannot be solved if we run away from them. Change is possible only if someone is willing to work for it”.
Ibrahim then applied for a grant to the UWCx initiative called GoMAD – Go Make a Difference. He submitted a project to be implemented in his home country in the Village of Kangama in the Nimiya chiefdom. This is a remote mining and farming area where approximately 60% of the total population is made up by children between 1 and 15 years of age, only half of whom have the possibility to get a primary education. Keenly aware of the importance of education Ibrahim has identified two key issues that need to be addressed in his village’s only primary school in order to attract more children and promote a healthy educational environment. The first is to provide the school with toilets, the lack of which is the cause for spreading deceases such as cholera and malaria. The second is the lack of drinking water, which is the main reason why many children cannot attend the school in the first place, as they are tasked with walking long distances every day in search of drinking water for their household.
Ibrahim’s project will benefit over 150 pupils and their families in Kangama and in the surrounding villages. He cannot wait to get started and his dream is that this may be just the first of a series of initiatives he can get started back at home.
