Educate West Point - EWP Liberia

Educate West Point (EWP) is a Liberian and US sister nonprofit giving the children of Liberia's largest slum a chance at a brighter future through the power of education. The Story Behind Educate West Point (EWP) In 2003, fourteen years of civil wars ended in Liberia after wreaking havoc across the country. After years of refuge, many Liberians returned home from wherever they were able to flee to with whatever they were able to carry — including EWP Founder, Musa Sheriff, who returned home from Guinea together with his mother and nothing in their pockets. After going back to school for only a few years in his home community of West Point - Liberia's largest slum located in Monrovia - Musa was forced to drop out of school in 2006 at the age of 14 to find work to help support his family. Just about a decade later, the biggest Ebola outbreak in history hit Liberia taking the lives of almost 5,000 people and setting the country back to the dire situation it was in long before the civil wars took place. Many Liberians did what they could to stay alive and help the people in their community do the same — this was no different for EWP Founder Musa Sheriff who joined More Than Me, a grassroots NGO, as an ambulance driver when they transitioned their educational institute to an Emergency Ebola Response Program. Musa and everyone else in the West Point slum watched the Ebola outbreak and pending aftermath tear apart their community. The single government school in West Point for all 75,000 residents became the Ebola Treatment Unit and not long thereafter, the residents protested causing damage to the school as they tried to force the government to relocate the ETU outside of their community (which was then under police quarantine as a government effort to help reduce the spread of the disease.) To this day, Liberia's education system is struggling to recover coming in significantly behind almost all other African countries in almost every education statistic. After learning the harsh realities keeping 21,000 vulnerable children in West Point out of school today, Musa Sheriff has inspired a group of people from all over the world to come together and do something about it. So what's our plan? 1.) Provide individualized psychosocial and financial support for vulnerable out of school children through EWP's sponsorship program. At $500 per year, EWP sponsorship covers two school uniforms, P.E. Uniform, socks, shoes, book bag, school supplies, healthcare assistance and two meals per day for the entire year. 2.) Partner with the Liberian Ministry of Education to help strengthen the single government school in West Point - N.V. Massaquoi Elementary and Junior High School. This includes supporting various initiatives ranging from infrastructure improvement to much needed school materials, and eventually from improving school wide feeding program and teacher training so all 1,136 students can benefit. 3.) Over the coming years, work with the government to identify solutions required to address the lack of space in government schools so all 21,000 out of school children are able to go to school. We hope you will join us in these efforts. #educatewestpoint #onechildonecommunity #thankyou