Standard Chartered Bank Ghana has brought together hundreds of students from some of Accra’s most underserved communities for a mentorship session at the bank’s head office, using an unusual partnership with a local cricket academy to deliver career guidance, professional role models and life skills to young people who rarely encounter them.
The session, held at Standard Chartered’s Accra headquarters, brought together students from basic and senior high schools linked to the Nsromma Cricket Academy, including Revere Basic School, Excellence Basic School, Aggrey Basic School, Sackey Odoi Basic School, Anumle Basic School, Nii Okai Basic School, Achimota Basic 1 and 2, Achimota Senior High School, Kwabenya Senior High School and Swift Complex. Students interacted directly with bank professionals across different career tracks, heard personal stories of perseverance and received guidance on balancing academic responsibilities with life challenges.
The event forms part of Standard Chartered’s “130 Days of Kindness” initiative, a campaign marking the bank’s 130th anniversary of operating in Ghana. Running from March through June 2026, the campaign will deliver a series of interventions focused on youth empowerment, financial literacy and small and medium enterprise (SME) support, with mentorship sessions as the centrepiece.
Head of Corporate Affairs, Brand and Marketing at Standard Chartered Ghana, Asiedua Addae, said the Nsromma Cricket Academy partnership was chosen deliberately because of the academy’s demonstrated ability to use sport as a mechanism for keeping vulnerable children in school. “Our focus in community impact is youth, particularly girls and persons living with disabilities. We were inspired by the work of the Nsromma Cricket Academy, which uses cricket to encourage young people to attend school and develop discipline,” she said, adding that bringing students into a professional banking environment allowed them to meet role models and be motivated toward concrete career ambitions.
Nsromma Cricket Academy was founded in 2012 by Samuel Nana Ekow Biney Asamoah, a retired mathematics teacher who built the programme around the conviction that cricket’s requirement for patience, discipline and teamwork could provide structure and values to children who lacked stable home environments. The academy currently engages approximately 500 students regularly and ran outreach programmes reaching nearly 10,000 children across Ghana last year. Students also receive academic support through weekend study camps designed to help them prepare for national examinations despite difficult home circumstances.
“I started this academy in 2012 to help children from vulnerable communities who often lack guidance and access to education. Cricket is more than a sport here,” Asamoah said. “It teaches discipline, respect, teamwork and responsibility.”
Bank professionals including Relationship Manager Gloria Edmond and Head of Digital Products Yao Wordih shared personal accounts of their own career journeys, describing the obstacles they overcame to reach their current roles. Edmond urged the students to remain focused and resist distraction, while Wordih told them that their backgrounds did not define their futures and that the key to seizing opportunities was being prepared to act on them when they arrived.
Following the mentoring session, students were taken on a guided tour of the bank’s office premises. Through its Mentors Den programme in 2025, Standard Chartered Ghana engaged more than 4,000 young people from underserved communities in similar sessions.
