Growing up, Adwoa Yeboah Owusu believed her path to success relied heavily on a single factor: education.
That sentiment still rings true for the Brock Geography master’s student, whose hard work has brought her to Canada from her native Ghana in pursuit of her graduate degree.
“I saw education as means out of poverty and an opportunity to make the world a better place,” Owusu says, reflecting on the emphasis her family placed on higher learning throughout her childhood. “Even though I’m not from a rich background, my father was always keen on education because he believed that it would get his kids to that next level.”
Her hard work and dedication to learning recently saw Owusu selected as one of this year’s 20 Horizon Graduate Student Scholarship recipients
Owusu’s passion, discovered while completing her undergraduate studies at the University of Ghana, lies in human geography, particularly the inequalities that exist between nations.
Through her research at Brock, she plans to examine infant mortality rates in Ghana in hopes of providing effective solutions to help address the issue by informing policy and programs in the African nation.
“Infant mortality rates are important to the development of every country and are also a link to the general health and well-being of people,” she says. “We want to decolonize contributing factors so we can understand those rates and the causes of infant mortality in the Ghanaian context, leading to better solutions.”