Nyarko hopes the quantitative and analytical skills he’ll learn at Harris will allow him to bring more opportunities to young Ghanaians.
Godfred “Kofi” Nyarko
Godfred “Kofi” Nyarko

Kofi Nyarko has spent the past two years scouring Ghana’s Lake Volta, searching for children to save. On the small fishing boats that trawl the world’s largest manmade reservoir, the sight of a young boy untangling fishing nets often suggests something evil: that a child has been sold into slavery.

As the nonprofit Mercy Project’s country director for Ghana, Nyarko has been fighting daily to eradicate slavery from his homeland, helping to liberate 60 children and reunify them with their families since the middle of 2017.

This fall, Nyarko began in the Master of Arts in International Development and Policy from The University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy with the aim of learning the quantitative and analytical skills that could allow him to bring more opportunities to young Ghanaians.

“I saw what poverty could force people to do – even sell their own children into slavery,” said Nyarko, 30. “My goal is to make sure that every human being has the same opportunities for education, health, and all of life’s needs.”

Nyarko knows firsthand the extraordinary efforts it can take to escape poverty.

He grew up in a small village in Ghana’s Central Region, raised by his grandmother, a peasant farmer. As a child, he carried a chair on his head each day to school so he wouldn’t have to sit on the ground while being taught in the village’s bare-bones schoolhouse.

As a teen, Nyarko moved to live with his mom in the city of Tema, living in a one-room home without electricity, studying at night by lantern. Eventually, he attended the University of Cape Coast, studying population and health.

After graduating, Nyarko volunteered for an NGO that organized youth sports as a forum to educate local kids on safe sex and reproductive issues. There he met his future wife Alison, who was studying abroad to be a teacher. In 2015, the couple moved to Charleston, South Carolina.

But Nyarko dreamt about giving back to his homeland, and in 2017, he returned to Ghana to fight child slavery.

“Some parents, because of poverty, are manipulated and bribed to release their children, as young as 4 or 5, to fishermen who take the kids away and make them slaves in villages where there is no school, no housing. Some boys don’t know how to swim, but the fisherman force them in, and some never come up again. When I learned about it, I thought, ‘Wow, I should have been here helping a long time ago.’ That motivated me to forego what I have to make sure children are freed.”

Despite his passion and success with Mercy Project, Nyarko said he began to feel stifled by not having the quantitative skills to perform a thorough analysis of his program and the new projects he wanted to implement. That feeling eventually led him to Harris.

“This job opened my eyes to the question, ‘How do I make sure my decisions give me the impact I want?’ And I felt my experience on the ground and my good will weren’t going to do that alone. When I learned about Harris’s evidence-based policy program, it stood out as exactly what I needed to do the things I wanted.”

Nyarko and his wife recently moved to Hyde Park. Though he anticipates they will eventually move back to Ghana, he’s open to exploring new opportunities in the government or nonprofit realms—anything he can do to give young people opportunities to thrive.

“We never know where life will take us. Life took me from Ghana, to the U.S., back to Ghana, and now back to the U.S. I’m always open. Sometimes, life takes a different course, but I believe progress is not possible without change.”