This year’s winners will come with us on a life-changing trip to Ghana, West Africa. Here you will meet our Change Leaders – local heroes improving life for children in Ghana and Africa. They will show you their Ghana: a place with its own challenges, but also full of hope and inspiring stories.You will also get to meet children from the local communities and hear their stories, their hopes and their dreams.
The travel includes round-trip flights, local transportation, accommodation and activities. The photos taken during the expedition will be published worldwide in Metro. This means that you will not only get a unique and life-changing experience, but your photos will also help to raise awareness and bring about positive change for children.
Below are some of the things that the winner will experience. Note that there may be changes in the program.
Walking tour in bustling Nima
You will be guided through the vibrant, busy and multicultural labyrinth that is Nima, part of Accra, the capital of Ghana with about four million residents. The tour ends on the grounds of DUNK, where children of the community gather to play basketball and study. DUNK is a free basketball academy for boys and girls created by Change Leaders Marie-Eve Lemieux and Mohammed Khaled.
Visit to Bolga
Bolga lies in northern Ghana on the Red Volta River valley, which serves as a major migration route for elephants and offers some spectacular landscape views. Here you will meet Change Leader Peter Ndonwie, founder of the Pan-African Organization for Women and Children. Peter will show us around the village and take us to the Bolga Vocational Training Centre, which he opened this year as a place to help youth in the region gain livelihood skills like carpentry, mechanics and sewing.
Challenging heights in Winneba
Winneba is a historic fishing town along the Ghanaian coast, 56 km west of Accra. One of the darker consequences of Winneba’s legacy as a fishing town is that poor children risk being traded as slaves to the fishing industry, thereby depriving them of their possibility to study and creating a negative spiral. The trip to Winneba includes a meeting with Change Leader James Kofi Annan, an inspiring example of how this negative spiral can be broken. He will tell his amazing story about how he himself was trafficked at age 6, but managed to escape at age 13. After forging a career as a successful bank manger, today he is running the Challenging Heights program to prevent other children from having to face what he did. James recently won the World Children’s Prize for his outstanding efforts.
