March, 2020
The COVID 19 brought the world to a hold and Ghana was no exception. High School & Tertiary Students were home from school with little to occupy themselves and missing out on the social activities they are used to. In Ghana, authentic local stories are rare and there is very little motivation to develop the creativity and imagination of the youth by engaging them in storytelling and sharing the African narrative. Studentshubgh & Sedesel saw this as a good opportunity to inspire the culture of local story telling among the youth while engaging them during the lock down period
Studentshubgh partnered with Sedesel Publications, a youth-owned publishing house in Ghana to launch a competition on story telling. The strategy was to have a theme based on current events which will inspire the youth to creatively write about the everyday happenings around them. The stories were to be creative writings of a maximum of 2000 words. Students were given the needed guidelines to support them in the successful process. The entire process was done online- students typed and submitted the stories digitally. The competition was launched online with collaboration with various media houses
Studentshubgh recruited volunteer judges from the young Ghanaian writing community to review the stories.; 16 judges took part in the process. The main objective was to have a transparent and fair process so communication was made on the judging process; each script was read by 2 judges in the initial round and then the final 25 scripts were each read by 5 judges to select the ultimate winners.
A total of 283 stories were received from various students across 13 regions of Ghana and the average age of participants was 20 years. Of the stories received, 57.7% of the studens were female. Finalists were selected and from there, three winners were chosen and awarded with a laptop, tablet and sets of books. All top stories will be published in a collection to collaborate the COVID 19 experience of young Ghanaian and the other interesting stories will be shared on the Studentshubgh website. Partnerships with various media houses and schools contributed to the success of this competition and the high numbers of submissions. It became evident that young people are very creative and need more incentives and motivation to share stories. Studentshubgh aims to organize more competitions to inspire creativity among the youth of Africa outside the STEM fields
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