Patrick Awuah

Posted by Staff Writer on Sunday, January 10, 2010 at 11:27pm.

Patrick Awuah is a director, founder and engineer.  A product of Achimota Secondary School, he left Ghana in 1985 to attend Swarthmore College and graduated with an engineering degree in 1990. He later joined the Microsoft Corporation working as an engineer and program manager, where he became a millionaire before he was 30. In 1997, He enrolled at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, to work on his dream of  building  a university in his home country of Ghana.

He left for Ghana to begin the process of forming Ashesi University. Ashesi, “beginning” in Akan (Twi), is a private liberal-arts college in Ghana that aims to train true leaders. On Dec. 17 2005, four years after enrolling its first crop of freshmen, Ashesi issued its first diplomas to a graduating class of 20 students.

In 2004, Swarthmore awarded Patrick an honorary doctorate in recognition of his leadership in African higher education. He is a fellow of the Africa Leadership Initiative (a project of The Aspen Institute, Databank, and Technoserve) and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Pacific Council on International Policy, and the Tau Beta Pi national honor society for excellence in engineering.