Clarkson Students Help Africa Grow
POTSDAM - By this time next year, a field of pineapples will be growing in a small town in West Africa to buy supplies for a school.
It will have been funded by a nonprofit organization run by a group of Clarkson students.
Francis O. Dayamba, a civil engineering major, started up the D'Amuge Fund last year to fund a small elementary school in Benin, a small country west of Nigeria on the coast of Africa. Though Mr. Dayamba is working at an internship in Illinois this fall, the group he started is continuing to help the school.
"What we do is we try to help schools in a sustainable way so, when we leave, whatever we started can run by itself," said the senior, whose parents live in Cotonou, the economic capital of Benin. "They're going to cultivate pineapples on a half a hectare of land. They'll make $3,000 every 11 months is what we're estimating in an area where people are living on a dollar a day."
Using the knowledge they've gained at Clarkson, the group drafted a business plan for the pineapple field, which will be planted in December. The group has also been selling bracelets and holding events about African culture to raise the $1,700 necessary for seeds and other farm equipment.
The name of the club is an amalgamation of the last names of Mr. Dayamba's parents; his mother's last name is Amuge and his father's is the same as his, Dayamba.
Mr. Dayamba and his family are going to supervise the planting and take pictures for donors and club members so they have something to show for their work, as well, according to Darryl A. Johnson, the club's vice president.
"Some of the funding already came from last semester's events," said Mr. Johnson, a senior supply chain management major. "We've already sent off half of the cash. It was just to buy the seeds, till the land, stuff like that."
In the past year, the club's roughly 20 members have been raising money for simple projects: $350 to bring clean water to the school and $650 for uniforms and a few scholarships.
"We cut the cloth so parents were involved in putting the uniforms together because if something is just given to them, they tend to take them for granted," Mr. Dayamba said.
In the same way, the student's parents will be the ones cultivating the pineapples and either trading them for school supplies or selling them for things like light fixtures for the building itself.
Sustainability is the goal of the D'Amuge Fund. The members bought the cloth from the town's three local tailors and had the parents sew their children's uniforms themselves.
It seems to be working. Since the D'Amuge Fund started, about 50 more children have been sent to the school, according to Mr. Dayamba. About 170 students are in the elementary school, which was chosen because it needed money and had a hard-working staff, he said. The town is about 70 miles from Cotonou, where his parents live and where he lived for about 10 years before going to a boarding school in neighboring Togo and then to Clarkson.
In the future, the D'Amuge Fund will expand to the secondary school in the area, so the younger students can continue their educations, Mr. Dayamba said. Club members also plan to start training programs for parents, so they can help their children succeed.
"The emotion of wanting to help is good, but you also want to make sure it's sustainable," he said. "Rather than giving a person a fish, you teach them how."
