MTN/Areeba spends $20m on scholarships

Accra, Nov. 20, GNA - Mobile Telecommunications Network (MTN) Ghana, formerly Areeba, mobile phone service providers, has over the past 10 years spent 20 million dollars on scholarships for brilliant but needy children in Ghana.

Ms Mawuena Adjo Dumor, Corporate Service Executive of MTN, said this when some beneficiaries of the scholarship scheme toured MTN facilities and offices in Accra.

She said network would launch the MTN Foundation, Ghana, on November 23, this year to expand its support for the education and health sectors.

She noted that the scholarship scheme MTN inherited from Areeba had over the past 10 years benefited a little over a 1,000 people, some of whom were now staff of MTN while others were doing well in various careers.

Currently, there were 340 beneficiaries on the scheme, who would continue to benefit for the next eight years. The scheme paid for their tuition and books until they obtained their first degree. "We are proud to have inherited such a thriving scholarship scheme from Areeba," she said, adding that under the new scheme, MTN would spend one per cent of its annual profit on providing academically resourceful centers, as well as health facilities to benefit more people.

Ms Dumor said in doing that MTN would collaborate with government and its agencies to ensure that the various facilities to be provided by the Foundation in Ghana would be strategically located and beneficial to more people.

She urged the current beneficiaries of the scholarship scheme, who are also the last batch of recipients, to live up to the responsibility of maintaining the high academic performance that got them the scholarship in the first place. She said MTN was committed to growing the Ghanaian professional locally, adding that so far the company had helped to produce some of the finest doctors, engineers and computer scientists. "We trust that as MTN Foundation invests more money into the area of health and education, more people would get the chance of benefiting from our support to realize their career dreams," she said. 20 Nov. 07