More than 15years ago, Awo Aidam Amenyah was an educator inspired by her love for knowledge sharing and an opportunity to use education as a tool to create social change. Always passionate about seeing children and young adults live their best lives with the freedom to think and express themselves. Awo believes in enabling and empowering young people with the right set of tools and resources so they thrive in life and despise seeing them being misrepresented.
Her teaching experience exposed and gave her first-hand knowledge of challenges of pupils and students especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds. This she responded to by developing local interventions and solutions whenever necessary. However, she wondered how many other young people would be going through similar situations across Ghana. This ignited an interest in social work, a field that would give her the freedom to pursue her passion; identifying social issues, resolving them, and also collaborating with stakeholders including Policymakers and Children to influence policy and change practices.
For over 2 decades, she has been influential in the development, facilitation, and policy decision specifically related to Education, Child Welfare, and well-being off/online in Africa through the Child Online Africa (COA), a non-profit organization she leads. As a passionate architect of change, Awo’s career values and goals revolve around Menstrual Hygiene, Child Abuse, and Violence Prevention, Child Sexual Exploitation, Reintegration of Survivors into Society, and Child Protection in all settings especially Online.
Adequate menstrual hygiene management will result in meaningful progress towards multiple Sustainable Development Goals, particularly goals 3,4, and 5. Through the Happy School Girl Project and other related projects that focusing on the girl child, Awo has fostered a network of women, girls, and young adults who are assertive, tenacious, morally upright, and instilled with the spirit of patriotism, leadership, and character.
Awo is an authorized DQ World Training Partner, a Member of the National Child Online Protection Steering Committee (Ghana),Vice-Chair of IGF Dynamic Coalition on Internet Standards, Security and Safety (IS3C-WG2) and Child Online Protection capacity development implementation partner for ITU. Awo has written four books, several handbooks and published articles and has spoken at several conferences and events local, regional and international. Besides being a founder, author, and thought speaker, she is a Board Member of Discovery Learning Alliance Advisory Committee Ghana and currently a member of the Board of Directors at the Africa Kidney Foundation.
In October 2020, Awo was recognized as a Humanitarian and in 2019 was awarded for her contribution towards cybersecurity development in Ghana by Ghana's Ministry of Communication & Digitization in honour of her pioneering work in Child Online Protection.