Sparked By A Facebook Page, High School Society Is Creating Networking Oppotunities For Students In Ghana

It took less than 10 minutes for Kwabena Baffour Awuah, a young entrepreneur and a pharmacy student to create a Facebook page in 2012 called ‘Senior High Schools and Colleges Page’

Within a month, the page had garnered a huge following on Facebook, making it popular among high school students.

At the time the main agenda of the Facebook page was to rank schools, provide news and information, publicize events and programs for high schools and run online competitions.

As the number of followers continue to soar, the scope of the initiative widened and took a differnt turn.

"At a point, we realized we could do more than just providing news and information to students, we could be a brand, an organization off the internet and social media," Awuah said in an Interview with modernghana.com.

"We did not even have a logo. So at one of our annual meetings, we decided to change the name of the organization from ‘Senior High Schools and Colleges Page’ to ‘High Schools Society," he added.

They settled on High Schools Society, because they wanted to establish a community, a network of students, specifically a society.

Their mission, according to Awuah is to establish a platform for students to network and establish a virtual community for them to connect and link up towards career development, mentorship and community service.

High School society wants to model after clubs such as Kiwanis International, Teen Ink and the Boys and Girls Clubs of America and hopes to expand to other African countries.

The organisation is not working in isolation as it has partenered other youth oriented organisations like Nsesa Foundation, Africa Schools Online and Speech Forces on some productive initiatives.

"At High School Society we believe the youth need a voice to connect, build and share ideas and we want to provide that medium to enable them to do that," he averred, adding, "we are thankful that what began just as a page on Facebook has grown into an organisation. However, we can do more, we can only get better. The work is just 1% done!"