Putting Community First
This is Auntie Frimpoma (left), the aunt of CFP’s co-founder, Dr Shadrack Frimpong.
When Dr. Frimpong was a child, Auntie Frimpomaa was wrongly misdiagnosed and treated by foreign volunteers, mainly students, during a medical trip to their village.
After that incident, her life was never the same. Her health worsened as she battled a debilitating medical condition that was a side-effect of the misdiagnosis.
She spent lots of money and time traveling to health facilities, sometimes 6 hours from their village to Kumasi, Ghana’s second-largest city.
In 2016, after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League university in the U.S., Dr. Frimpong decided to forgo lucrative offers and return home. His mission was simple: build a community hospital so Auntie Frimpomaa (and many others) could access care for the condition that the top-down medical volunteers had caused.
But it was a little too late already.
While Auntie Frimpomaa was able to benefit from the closer clinical care and live for an additional six years, she eventually passed away in May 2022.
But her story isn’t an isolated one.
Every hour, millions of people die, are injured, and are abused due to poor community engagement in social impact initiatives.
At The Community First Pledge, we will not rest until such unnecessary deaths and harms, are eliminated for good.
