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Shadrack Frimpong, a social entrepreneur from Ghana, has been awarded an Honorary Doctorate by Royal Holloway, University of London for his efforts as a social entrepreneur.
Frimpong, a Gates Scholar and PhD student in Public Health and Primary Care at the University of Cambridge, is also the founder and CEO of Cocoa360, which is improving lives, notably in farming communities in Ghana. The Ghanaian student’s work encouraging community development, enabling cheap healthcare, and providing free education to young women is inspiring to students at Royal Holloway, University of London.
Frimpong’s life story is quite inspirational. He fought several difficulties to prosper after being born to a peasant farmer and charcoal merchant in the cocoa-farming hamlet of Tarkwa Breman in Ghana’s Western Region. Frimpong was inspired to become a doctor after contracting a potentially fatal sickness as a young boy in his hometown. His two legs were nearly severed at the time because local herbalists couldn’t discover a cure, but he “miraculously” survived the infection.
“This experience taught me about the importance of second chances, which I like to term as ‘life’s greatest miracle.’ I have since committed to live a life that will provide others with second chances too,” Frimpong said.
Frimpong attended Opoku Ware School in Kumasi, Ghana, and later attended the University of Pennsylvania in the United States, where he graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Biology in 2015 as a flagbearer, university scholar, and the first Black student to receive the prestigious $150,000 President’s Prize.
While in college, Frimpong established the Tarkwa Breman Community Alliance (now Cocoa360), which began operating a school for females and a community hospital in his hometown, with earnings from a Tarkwa-Breman cocoa plantation.
Frimpong also founded Students for a Healthy Africa, which provides free health insurance to HIV/AIDS orphans in Ghana and operates a health clinic and a water well in two communities in Nigeria. He also developed the African Research Academies for Women, a fellowship that overcomes the gender gap in African science through yearly summer research internships.
In 2019, he was appointed as the editor of the Yale Journal of Health Policy, Law, and Ethics at Yale University, where he also teaches a Master of Public Health – MPH in Global Health.His work has been honored by the White House of the United States, Ghana’s Flagstaff House, and former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan. He has also dined with some of the world’s most prominent people, including former US President Bill Clinton.
Six years ago, he received the Future Award at the 2017 Ghana Legacy Honors for his work in community health and education for disadvantaged children in his town of Tarkwa-Breman, which organizers hoped will change Ghana’s future.
