One World Unity

One World Unity maintains a vigilant watch over the world and interdicts where regional socio-economic conditionals exist that bar a child's access to any reasonable opportunity to a positive future. We provide this opportunity largely through education.

Our mission is to provide a path to a positive future to children without, and to give them the means to change their communities—through education. The world is full of children hungry for futures they can never have. Without access to basic education, there are considerable limitations to what a child can do with his/her life.

Sierra Leone has remained in the bottom ten countries of the UN’s “livability” index since One World Unity was formed in 2009. Illiteracy is high, and school attendance is low. Many in our Freetown community cannot afford the cost of sending their children to public school. It’s there that an individual’s future stops. A child who grows up in a country with massive unemployment and only the streets for an education will likely come upon not even the sliver of an opportunity to reach his/her dreams, and that’s a problem. One World Unity provides these opportunities.

• School: We have sponsored and supervised the building of a new school in Freetown, Sierra Leone. The school provides quality education to children who otherwise likely would not have the means to attend public school. This primary (Elementary) school is registering 187 children for the 21/22 school year, our fourth year as an official private school. Our students receive free education with all supplies covered by us. The school was built by Sierra Leones, taught by Sierra Leoneans, and directly managed by Sierra Leoneans.

• Junior Scholarship Program: Before we built our school, we offered recurring scholarships to children to attend public school (K-12 equivalent), books and supplies included. This averages around $100/year per child—a obstacle too high for many families. We continue to run this program as our capacity at the school is limited.

• University Scholarship Program: We’ve had children who otherwise would not have gone to school sponsored by use all the way from elementary school to graduating high school. At around $600/year, only the wealthiest can afford to attend a Sierra Leonean university. We have had students graduate with medical, law, engineering degrees and much more. That’s a very real chance at a different future.

One World Unity works with a population whose education system has reeled since a decade-long civil war ending in 2002 tore what little of it there was to tatters. Our local community has subsequently faced unending poverty, a three-year Ebola epidemic, deadly and damaging floods, and Covid. Without intervention, a great many of these children will grow up to scrape by on less than a dollar a day, their childhood hopes and dreams eroded from their memories by the harsh lives they were born into.

A quick injection of cash, even a very large amount, does nothing to change this trend over the long term. Schools are regularly built and abandoned, the income to sustain them dried up. NGOs donate school supplies for a year or two, but by year three nothing has changed in the child’s living situation, and he/she only loses his/her educational opportunities a few years later.

One World Unity offers consistent, quality education. The school will be there for them as long as they continue to work hard in their schooling. The bar of entry to public school education is low to most of us in the first world, and this little bit keeps kids off the streets and into a positive learning environment. Graduating from high school in Sierra Leone is not a guarantee of success, but it does mean a child will be literate, can perform mathematics, and has a larger and academic view of the world. They have at least made themselves a path to a better future.

The positive effects on the individual child are well-established. One of the girls sponsored by us from the beginning was just hired on as a lawyer after five years of law school. This is someone who would not have completed elementary school without our assistance. One World Unity benefits the community at large as well, though the effects are stunted without further funding.

Our school is pre-school and elementary. This addresses many of the kids who yearn for the opportunity, but not those pressured by family poverty to dropout in the middle and high school grades—a tremendous but understandable problem in Sierra Leone. The community elders are on the same page as us, asking that if ever there is a way, these are the children we should reach out to next. We want to build a middle/high school, staffed with quality Sierra Leonean teachers. Children from our existing elementary school would graduate into the new one, receiving consistent education, expectations, and encouragement. If we increased funding to our university scholarship program, we could promise a child quality education from their elementary years all the way through graduating high school, then send them to university or a trade school if accepted.

Every year our children take a national exam which compares them to their peers throughout the country and determines if they are promoted to the next grade or not. Our children score much higher than the national norm, and given consistent quality education throughout their education, we are certain to see incredible results. In this way, as well as through measuring the success of our university students, we can be confident in the success of our programs.