Understanding the MoringaCommunity.Org Mission

Moringa Community is a non-profit committed to helping the people of Ghana, W. Africa to

improve their quality of life. To this end, Moringa Community is dedicated to developing sustainable

locally appropriate technologies and to provide occupational opportunity mainly in the areas of trade

and agricultural education which ultimately improves the quality of life for individuals, their families

and their community in the lives we touch. Moringa USA has successfully partnered with Moringa

Community Org Ghana enabling the construction and full operation of the Moringa Community School

of Trades (MCST) in the village of Breman Baako, Central Region, Ghana. MCST not only

provides a high school level education to Ghanaian youth beyond the typical ninth grade education,

but also adds vocational trade education to the curriculum. While studying high school level mathe-

matics, history, English grammar & composition, MCST also provides training in machine-based

woodworking, technical drawing, masonry, electricity & wiring, food services, art, weaving, sewing,

soap making, introduction to computers and business education. Additionally, and most impressively,

MCST offers extensive programs in agricultural, organic farming, animal husbandry, and as of 2014

operates what is considered by many to be the most successful food preservation educational program

in West Africa through the introduction of traditional western style home canning. This canning

initiative has been sponsored by private donors with significant and generous support from

Jarden Home Brands, makers of Ball Mason Jars and home canning supplies.

MoringaCommunity.Org (USA) is a 501(C)3 char ity, founded by Jeffry & Linda Lohr in 2008,

enabling the visionary Ghanaian, Abubakar Abdulai (Abu) to create the Ghana NGO Moringa Commu-

nity Org (Ghana) and to build and operate MCST. Although the majority of our funding to date has

come from private individual donation, our charity has also been honored with significant support from

Rotary International, DeWalt Industrial, The Philadelphia Foundation and The Dapplecroft

Fund, and several generous private family trusts. Although we have no affiliation with any religious

organization, our project has also had support from a number of community church organizations.

In the end, however, it is the private individual donor that has supplied over 75% of our funding to date

and from whom we most rely to enable this work.

Our Philosophy

MoringaCommunity.Org is a practical goal-oriented grassroots effort to improve the lives of the

impoverished in West Africa. Our goal is not to give charity but to educate and empower Ghanaians

according to the philosophy of "Give a man a fish and feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and feed

him for a life time." We can throw endless dollars of aid to Africa to feed its people temporarily,

however, in the end such aid does little to solve the long-term problem, it only treats the symptoms.

Our goal is to assist the African people to help themselves and to determine their own future, not to

remain victims of the past. We are not formally affiliated with any religion and support all whom we

serve equally, regardless of sex, ethnicity or faith. We believe education is the best tool to fight poverty.

We seek to enable the development of small businesses that can sustain individuals and their families

through the joy of work and the satisfaction of accomplishment. We are a charity of unpaid volunteers.

One would be hard pressed to find a more authentic charity to support that makes such effective use of

every single dollar that it is blessed to receive.

1 * see: h�p://ghana.usembassy.gov/educa�on-of-ghana.html

*

Yes, we built it and yes, they came!

Enabled by strong private American donor support and an enormous amount of Ghanaian volunteer labor,

MCST finally was able to construct our project’s much needed dormitory. In tandem with the dormitory

project, Abu had the vision to also build on-campus teacher housing (seen at the bottom of the hill in the

image below). The Moringa Community School of Trades can now handle over (60) sixty students at a time.

Moringa Dormitory enables enrollment expansion

While the dormitory building was important, it wasn’t usable without mattresses and bedding for our

student bunks. Thankfully, after the 2012/2013 dormitory construction fund drive, we were blessed with

a 2014 grant from the Rotary Club of Pottstown, PA (in association with Rotary International).

The grant enabled us to buy 60 student mattresses and 60 bed sheet sets & pillows

for our MoringaMade bunks. Please know that all work at our school is done by

Moringa for Moringa, including bunk construction, sheet dyeing and embroidery.

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Abu is a visionary and a man constantly in motion.

When he has no resources to work with, he creates them.

As our Moringa’s 6+ acres of annexed fertile local farm-

land has no water, Abu bartered with well diggers

Bismark & Kojo to dig three wells for us. While digging

one, they hit solid rock 20ft down, but thankfully two

wells were successful and yield a good flow of water.

As per my caption below the well-digging photo,

seeing this image concerned me. To see it is scary but,

the reality is that this is how all of our ancestors dug

their wells as it was the only way available to them. In

fact my own farm well here in Schwenksville, PA goes

down 28 feet (as pictured below left) and was dug the same

way somewhere around 1826.

Please look closely at the images on these pages and

see the hearts, backs, and hope being put into the

work. Your basic financial support (no matter how

small) is the catalyst that gives these people the

strength to hold fast to the dream. A little bit of hope

can go a long way when the odds are so heavily

stacked against people. Understand how much every

one of these people give back in way of honoring your

support with their own hard work. They don’t just

consume your support, they use it to grow something

even bigger.

Please note MCST’s

drip irritation lines laid in

the photo to the right.

This system is powered

by a gas-driven pump

connected to our wells.

Moringa Community farm is first in district

to irrigate in attempt to grow year-round

Jeff: “Abu, aren’t these guys afraid of cave in?”

Abu: “Ha, Ha, Poppa, these are well diggers.

This is what we do in Ghana.”

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Moringa’s quest to offer the community the best in

the way of practical agricultural education that works

within the realistic means our students can hope to

afford is exemplary. Abu reports that the project is

blessed to have Mr. Adom Maxwell as department

head of Moringa’s Agricultural Ed. Program.

Adom Maxwell Agricultural Ed.

Teacher

Mr.Maxwell is a

graduate of the

Asuansi Farm Institute

Our agricultural program includes theory and

classroom study, in addition to hands-on field

work. Learning-by-doing while also helping

our school is a win-win for all.

Although we joke about them in the cartoon above right, free ranging goats have been a

huge problem for our farm. It is common place in Ghana for the people to let their goats roam free.

As a consequence, we’ve had to hire a 24-hour watchmen/goat chaser who lives in a shelter

we’ve built on our farmland so our crops are protected from the local foraging goat population. 4

2014 Greetings America from Moringa Community School of Trade (MCST)

by project co-founder Abubakar Abdulai (Abu) First, please let me thank all our American friends for enabling our educational project to own by deed

our 18+ acres of land. Building and growing a project like MCST on such a safe foundation of legal owner-

ship is not common in Africa, so please know how much we are blessed to have such a secure foundation on

which to build our future.

As many know, we took the name of our project from the Moringa plant. All need to know that this plant

alone can solve much of malnutrition problems suffered by thousands of people in Africa, and providing our

local district people with the products we make from Moringa Olifera is one of the core aims of our project.

Several surrounding communities, inside and outside Ghana, have already benefited from the Moringa

products we supply, especially the pregnant women, breast feeding mothers, and children. Malnutrition is a

major factor in high rates of infant mortality in Africa. Worldwide, billions of people die each year from hun-

ger related causes and of these, the majority are caused by chronic under nutrition. One of the products we

grow and process at MCST is Moringa powder. We have worked hard to develop our Moringa plantation and

to grow this magic Moringa tree but we have also been careful to diversify to other vegetable and fruit crops.

Now Moringa Community School of Trade has the best to offer in Ghana especially since the completion

of our girl’s & boy’s dormitory. The school now has many departments for students to learn: food services

department, food preservation and home canning, organic farming, livestock, land and water management, an

excellent carpentry and machinery (M.J.T.W.M.S) department, plus masonry, electricity, building and con-

struction, drafting, business education, and computer training. Art and craft is included with batik, tie & dye,

embroidery, kentey weaving, textile, sewing and dress making, and a new bamboo products department. We

are also proud to include high school level English, mathematics, history, and science as core subjects. Each

department has one teacher that teaches both practical application and theory. We are hoping to generate

enough income to employ more teachers because the number of students is increasing weekly.

Hassan and Emmanuel are two of our past students who benefited from our home caning and carpentry

training. After completing the training, they were given a $500 loan from Madam Linda which gave them the

opportunity to establish a business of their own and to pay it back to enable the next beneficiary. As soon as

Hassan has paid her loan, Emmanuel will get the money to buy his own Mr. Jeffry’s Third World Machine

Shop (M.J.T.W.M.S) and open his shop.

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Our school currently charges a small tuition from students. We have hired good teachers who generous-

ly agreed to work at partial salary with faith that the MCST will one day fully operate on its own so they

may be paid fully. Regardless of their sacrifice, our teachers believe their families will have a better fu-

ture through this project.

Since completing our dormitory construction, our school resumed our full time operations in Septem-

ber. Since then, MCST has at least five additional new students weekly. Some students have paid part of

their tuition, others have not paid yet. Many of the applicant parents have come to us pleading for addi-

tional time to pay. We want to help everyone but we do not have enough money to help everyone. We do

what we can.

Many parents mention how wonderful this project is for the community. They want their children to be

in school, but unfortunately they can’t afford what it takes to make the children’s life better, even though

our school charges far below the lowest price for a secondary education. (Understand that the Ghana edu-

cational system is different than USA and most children are unable to go beyond the 9th grade, many only

6th grade, as secondary education is tuition based and prohibitively expensive for entry). The parents

plead with us at our PTA meetings not to send their children onto the street. The same parents also men-

tion how important it is to them to have such a wonderful opportunity like MCST because our agricultural

consult service also helps them and other farmers. Ghanaian farmers are the poorest people in the coun-

try. This is often because their methods of farming are poor and transporting what they do grow to market

is difficult, if not nearly impossible. They use their physical strength to do all of the work by hand rather

than by machine, so loss of time and spoilage due to delay in getting goods to market is common.

All of these issues are affecting the school management because the parents are not able to pay for the

tuition. We need to maintain our good reputation by continuing to give the best education to our students,

all the while hoping parents will soon have better answers to their financial problems. We have faith that

the parents will pay the tuitions in full, but as we all know, finding money with limited resources is hard.

In response to these struggles, we have been thinking of what MCST can do to help these farmers in

ways that benefit them and help us reach our goal of self sustainability. Since ninety percent of our stu-

dent’s parents are farmers, we think that with knowledge of home-canning, their products can be pre-

served from time of harvest (when the market is flooded and prices low) and saved for sale in the dry sea-

son when prices are higher. This, we think, will better enable our farmer parents to pay their children’s

tuition.

Of course nothing is as easy as it seems. Since it takes so much to sell in distant markets, we’ve been

forced to sell our own MoringaMade products only within our local district, but this community alone

cannot consume nor pay for all that we produce. Added to this complication, the food authority has de-

manded, until we have certain specific facilities they require in place, they will not license us to sell out-

side our district.

Our current effort to solve these problems has been to open a restaurant at our school as another means

of selling our canned products. The restaurant will generate more money than would selling our products

at greater distances as costs are less than the requirements of the food authority. Currently our school res-

taurant is where all teachers, students, and some locals buy food. We think we can gain more if we open

branches in neighboring villages. Despite the challenges, we will always keep trying. Abu

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Abu has enlisted the help of Shariff Ahmed Boateng as the functioning

Academic Headmaster of the Morigna Community School of Trades. It was

apparent that along with our other goals, MCST becoming an accredited and

accepted school of secondary education was not only at the core of our mis-

sion, it was the key to the project’s survival. To help achieve this goal, Abu

needed the help of a truly qualified and trusted professional.

Mr. Boateng holds an advanced degree in education from the University

of Cape Coast. Equally as important, he has many years of experience in

working with the Ghana Department of Education (GDE) so he knows how

to align our core academic program offerings properly while also under-

standing how to deal with the bureaucracy of the GDE. Please refer to page

1 for a complete list of both the trade and academic programs MCST offers.

Moringa Community School of Trades secures

official accredita on in secondary educa on!

A: Mr. Gartley teaches a lesson in

mathematics.

B: Mr. Asare teaches a lesson in

English and composition.

C: The weekly staff meeting in the

Moringa Restaurant and dining hall.

MCST MONTHLY OPERATING EXPENSES

We have 15 paid Ghana staff positions with an

average salary of $135/month each, plus:

$870/month consumable supplies budget

$205 average monthly electric bill

$300 average propane and diesel .

Moringa Community School of Trades total

monthly operating expense is only $4,000.

We so need only basic support to keep this worthwhile and achievement oriented project functioning.

Please continue to support this project of hope and growth. 7

I think the worthiness of the Moringa

project is self evident. With American

donor support and truly remarkable

African sweat equity, we’ve built a func-

tioning school that now provides second-

ary and trade education to many that

otherwise would lack any opportunity to

have it. We’ve done everything we set

out to do and perhaps even a lot more.

From the beginning, our goal has

been to make this project self-sustaining.

To that end, the Moringa project is about

as close to self-sustaining as it can be.

Nearly everything is finished on the con-

struction and the development/operations

side of the school in Ghana so the school, as you can see, is indeed functioning. Now, all it needs is to find the

funding it needs to meet its annual operating expense of $48,000 a year. Before I go on, please reflect on $48K

for a moment and realize that the equivalent of just one single middle class American’s annual income can fully

fund an entire school in Africa for an entire year. That $48,000 can educate 60+ high school aged kids, pay the

entire payroll for 15 staff members (9 of which are African college educated), cover our entire utility and fuel

costs, and pay for our annual consumable expenses including food!

The Ghana side of this project has done remarkable things and they are ever-striving to achieve our shared,

long term goal of full self-sustainability. The reality is, however, that even tuition based schools need some

source of outside funding to remain operational. Please don’t stop donating to Moringa because we’ve taken a

hard line on forcing self sustainability. You can trust our USA organization to carefully manage your donations

to ensure every dollar is applied exactly, and only, where it is most needed.

Please don’t forget MoringaCommunity.Org in your

annual charitable giving. Please Donate Today!

Jeff Lohr

Please know, Moringa still needs your support

If you do nothing else a)er reading this flier, please view the Moringa Bridge Saga on

our blog at: www.moringacommunity.blogspot.com 8

Moringa Community.Org is proud of

its remarkable programs to cost ratio

As the volunteer bookkeeper of the 501(c)(3) organization,

it gives me great pride to inform our supporters that 97.0% of

the 2013 expenditures, and 99.6% of the 2014 expenditures

(to-date), went directly to the program expenses for Moringa

Community Org in Ghana. Administrative and fund-raising

expenses were very small.

Jeff continues to be frugal with our donations. Administrative expenses include Pennsylvania State

Department filing fees, telephone calls to Ghana, office supplies, insurance, PayPal fees, and the account-

ant's fees for independent financial reviews required by the State of Pennsylvania. Jeff has stopped

formal fundraising so there was no fundraising expenses in 2014. However, Jeff and all associated with

this project remain ever hopeful donors will continue to see the worthiness of the Moringa Community

project and continue to donate whenever possible even though Jeff won't be hounding you for money.

All work is by volunteers and there are no salaries paid. The U.S. NGO pays no rent. This is a bare

bones project that gets it done! The entire volunteer team appreciates your financial support.

Should you wish to make a further tax deductible donation, you may do so on-line using the PayPal link

http://moringacommunity.org/SupportUs/Donate.html or you may mail as follows:

PLEASE DONATE TODAY!

Donate Online at www.MoringaCommunity.Org

Or mail your tax deductible donation check

payable to Moringa Community to:

Moringa Community

c/o Jody Christianson

PO Box 3007

Bozeman, MT 59772-3007

If mailing your dona on, please provide us with your email address to save us on the cost of postage to send your thank you

and your formal receipt for your tax records. We promise we will not share your email with any other party for any reason.

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