Yaw Yeboah chases the ball during an early-morning training session before class begins at the Academy. (Courtesy Paul Wassell)

In a bar in Accra in the fall of 1999, David Esch, then working for USAID in West Africa, first met Tom Vernon. Vernon, a nineteen-year-old college dropout from England, was unemployed, with little more than his UEFA soccer coaching license and a vague idea about starting a soc•cer academy in Ghana. “I plan to stay in Ghana for five years,” Vernon told Esch that night matter-of-factly. Accustomed to the constant coming and going of white people in West Africa, Esch could see that Vernon was different: “I could tell he had a sort of long-term dream.”

Ten years later, Vernon is the founder and director of the thriving Right to Dream Soccer Academy in Dawu, Ghana. Right to Dream is a residential boarding school that enrolls approximately sixty boys on full scholarship, most of whom come from families that are unable to afford even the nominal fee for public school in Ghana.

Vernon started out by organizing soccer practices for boys on a dust field in Accra on weekends. Quickly realizing the boys’ potential, both in terms of talent and character, he spent the next few years struggling to train, teach, house, and feed the boys from his own home.

In 2003, Vernon was able to move the boys to the present site of the Academy. By Western standards, the facilities are rudimentary at best. The main classroom, a wall-less structure with a tin roof overlooking the sole soccer field, also serves as the cafeteria. Running water is never guaranteed, and each student washes his only soccer uniform by hand each night before bed. At first glance, it would be difficult to imagine that Vernon calls these boys “the most privileged kids in Africa.”

In November 2008, ESPN.com ran a story titled “Hungry for a Better Life,” which profiled a student’s admission into the Academy and two students’ graduation from the Academy and matriculation at New England boarding schools. Unfortunately, ESPN’s illustration of the Academy as a one-way ticket out of Ghana was myopic. The Right to Dream Academy is an experiment in education meant to further the development of Ghana, not export its most promising students.

“In the beginning,” Vernon said, “the only career path we knew was professional football. Since then, our objectives and goals have changed. Now, we are educating boys who can contribute to Ghana in many different ways.” While still training some of the continent’s most talented athletes, the Academy also aims to educate Ghana’s next generation of leaders. “If they put the work in, they have the possibility of choosing between three opportunities of a lifetime,” Vernon explained.

First, there is the professional soccer route, a realistic possibility for some. In August, the Right to Dream Under-15 team finished third in the Nike Premier Cup held in Manchester, England, the most competitive youth soccer tournament in the world. To date, two boys, King Osei Gyan and Daniel Owusu, have signed professional contracts with the Fulham Football Club in the English Premier League.

Secondly, as only a few will play in Europe’s top professional leagues, each year several boys win full scholarships to elite high schools and universities across the United States and Europe, where they dominate on the soccer field and beyond. Chris Downs, head coach of the varsity team at The Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Connecticut, explained: “The Right to Dream boys have been role models — their optimism, enthusiasm, and resilience have served to inspire the entire community.” Hotchkiss student Albert “C.K.” Kumah won one of the school’s most prestigious academic awards, while his fellow Right to Dream graduate James Nortey has emerged as the school’s premier modern dancer. This fall, twenty Right to Dream boys will be studying in the United States and Europe.

The opportunities available for students who stay in Ghana, however, are just as remarkable as those that await them abroad. Graduates who stay are invited to continue at the Academy as coaches, teachers, and administrators. While perhaps less glamorous than playing in Europe or studying in America, the boys who stay on are respected every bit as much as those who leave. These boys may well have the most direct impact on the future of the Academy by ensuring that each year a new generation of Ghanaians will be able to share in this life-changing opportunity.

Richard Dowden, director of the Royal African Society and author of Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles, has written that “only Africans can develop Africa.” Tom Vernon agrees. “In twenty-five years,” he said, “I’d like to think that there will not be a white face at the Academy. The Academy runs on a model where Africans can eventually create and run their own model.”

Since a significant number of boys do study outside Ghana, a sense of national pride plays a critical role in the curriculum and ethos of the school in order to ensure that these boys will not be part of the “brain drain”: the departure of African professionals for the West that has plagued the continent since the 1960s.

While the oldest Academy graduates are at most twenty years old, many of the boys who are studying abroad plan to return to Ghana. “I hope one day to return to help children through football and education,” said Atobra Ampadu, Academy graduate and junior co-captain of the varsity team at Hotchkiss.

Recently, the role of NGOs in the developing world has come under increased scrutiny. Professor Alan Fowler, co-founder of the International NGO Training and Research Centre, has called the proliferation of NGOs in Africa a “second wave of colonialism.” He argues that some NGOs delegitimize the African state by virtue of their disproportionate influence on politics, policy, and even values. The Academy program, however, consciously embraces a unique blend of Ghanaian and Western values. Lively debates, dance and theater performances, and student-led classes all help incorporate different cultures into the classroom.

Punishments assigned at the Academy also combine Western and Ghanian ideals. Last spring, roughly a dozen first and second year boys arrived two days late to the start of the semester. Vernon was not pleased. “Clubs in Europe have stereotypes about African players: that they come late to training and are unreliable. You have to take radical steps to change behaviors that reinforce these stereotypes or you are killing the entire continent,” he said emphatically.

To determine the boys’ punishment, Vernon consulted the director of dormitory life, a Ghanaian man who lives with the boys full-time. Together, they decided that for one week, those boys who were late would be awakened in the middle of the night to run uphill wind-sprints, and their diets restricted to three bowls of rice a day (less than the standard Academy diet, but still more food than many would eat at home).

While these punishments may seem harsh, Vernon explained the importance of communicating disapproval in a way that the kids can understand. “At home, if a boy were to mess up, his father would beat the hell out of him,” Vernon said bluntly. “The boys must realize what is acceptable and what is not from Day One.”

Ampadu said that these types of physical punishments were not uncommon when he was at the Academy. Choosing his words carefully, he said: “I won’t say it’s good and I won’t say it’s bad. When we were punished, we knew we had to be on our feet.”

“Caring but tough” could also serve as an apt metaphor for the approach to Africa outlined by President Obama. In July, thousands of Ghanaians took to their feet and beat djembe drums to greet Obama on his first visit to sub-Saharan Africa since taking office. In his speech in Accra, Obama spoke bluntly of the need to bring an end to corruption and strong-man politics in Africa. He declared: “Aid is not an end in itself. The purpose of foreign assistance must be creating the conditions where it's no longer needed.”

As the success of the Right to Dream Academy suggests, the model of an African-run institution for Africans that takes advantage of Western influence has enormous potential in the twenty-first century. How to apply the Right to Dream model on a larger scale is a critical question for the future of African development.

Nathaniel Sobel is a sophomore in Berkeley College.

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