Junior Henry Musa Kpaka has been awarded a fellowship to attend the Public Policy and International Affairs (PPIA) Junior Summer Institute at Princeton University.
The prestigious summer program caters to students interested in pursuing careers in government and public service. The program prepares students for graduate study and careers in public policy and international affairs.
“I see myself getting a career in the public service field, whether it’s international or local in my native country of Sierra Leone,” said Kpaka, an economics major and French minor, who is specifically interested in aiding people in developing countries.
In addition to gaining insight into his projected field of further study, Kpaka hopes he can also apply the knowledge and experience he will gain from his summer at Princeton to Youth Development Initiative (YDI), an organization that he created at Whitman in fall 2007.
YDI strives to empower youth in developing countries to take an active role in changing their communities and in national development. It was inspired by the national empowerment workshop that Kpaka organized for youth in Sierra Leone with a grant he was awarded for the 2007 Kathryn Wasserman Davis 100 Projects for Peace.
“I’m hoping that my experience at Princeton will give me some more theoretical grounding and more insight into what goes into having an organization like YDI succeed and grow,” said Kpaka.
Besides attending the PPIA Institute, Kpaka will also travel to Sierra Leone this summer with a group of Whitman students who are involved with YDI to conduct another youth workshop.
The workshop will focus on community involvement and on the importance of community service. The goal of the workshop is to have participants devise and implement community service projects, which YDI will help finance.
“Sierra Leone is so poor that every project will make a difference,” said Kpaka.
YDI is hoping to raise enough money to award 14 grants of $500 to finance a project in each of the 14 districts of the country.
“Since our goal is to have widespread youth activism in the country, we don’t want to leave any district out,” said Kpaka.
Interested donors can find more out information about YDI’s plans for this summer on YDI’s Web site, whitman.edu/ydi.
