How It All Began: The Story of Ramah
In June 2021, a Computer Science student at the University of Ghana watched his laptop break and gave the next forty days to God. The calling that emerged was deeply personal, rooted in a decade of generosity he had received and a conviction that the orphans, widows, and children of Nabdam District deserved the same chance he was given.
Forty days and a broken laptop
In June 2021, Patrick Attankurugu was a Level 300 Computer Science student at the University of Ghana when his laptop broke down. He faced weeks without the tool his studies depended on, and rather than lose them, he made an unusual choice: he gave them to God.
He set aside 40 days for prayer, asking a single question: what do You want to do with my life? He did not know yet what the answer would be. But by the end of those forty days, an answer had come. It was not a strategy or a career plan. It was a burden he could not put down. God was calling him to advance the cause of the widow and the orphan.
A door opened through service
The story behind that moment began five years earlier.
In 2016, Patrick had just completed senior high school and written his WASSCE exams. With no immediate path forward, he found an opportunity through an employment agency and travelled south, arriving in Accra on the 2nd of June. He entered the home of a family he would serve. It would become a chapter of his life that lasted a decade.
Three months later, his WASSCE results arrived. They were excellent. After a year of faithful service, his benefactors made a decision that changed the course of his life: recognising his potential, they enrolled him at the University of Ghana to study Computer Science. Patrick attended lectures each day, returning to the household each evening. It was an arrangement built on trust, generosity, and mutual respect.
What that household taught him
Over the years, Patrick watched up close what it looks like when people invest in someone else's potential. He absorbed the quiet mechanics of economic independence: the discipline, the long view, the courage to start before everything is ready. He learned that dignity is not something handed to a person. It is something they are positioned to build for themselves.
The family did not give him charity. They gave him a platform. That distinction, between aid that creates dependence and investment that creates independence, became the foundation of everything Ramah would later stand for.
A debt that can only be repaid forward
By the time the 40-day fast ended in 2021, Patrick knew what he was being called to do. He also understood why the calling felt so personal.
He had received an extraordinary gift: people who believed in his potential and backed that belief with action. He decided he would spend his life replicating that gift for others. And no one, he believed, was more deserving than the orphans, widows, and vulnerable children of Nabdam District, people from his own region who would never have the chance to travel to Accra and find the kind of opportunity he had found.
The goal was clear: do not bring them to opportunity. Bring opportunity to them. Empower them where they are.
The start-anyway moment
Patrick wrote the idea down in 2021 and set himself a condition: he would only begin once he had left the household, which he planned to do in 2023.
July 2023 came. He was still there.
Rather than wait any longer, he called five friends. He told them what he believed God wanted them to do, and asked them to help him start. They said yes. For the next year, the founding team prayed, read everything they could find on how charitable work is done, and quietly prepared the ground. They were not well-resourced. They were not yet even well-organised. But they had said yes.
On September 16, 2024, the organisation was officially registered with the Ghana Registrar-General's Department as a Company Limited by Guarantee (Reg No: CG064480924). The name Ramah comes from the Hebrew word for "a high place": a place of elevation, hope, and restoration.
The ten-year arc
As of 2026, Patrick is approaching a decade in the household that shaped him. He is already a senior executive in a regulatory technology company, where he leads the engineering team today. The founding team has grown from five friends into a structured organisation. Co-founders Lawrencia Owusu and Gregory Amoah serve alongside Patrick, and a locally-recruited team of twelve is preparing to deliver Ramah's first programmes on the ground.
Looking back, Patrick sees the decade not as a detour but as preparation. The generosity that opened a door for a young man from the Upper East Region is now being channelled into opening doors for hundreds of others who come from the same place he did.
That is Ramah.
Where the vision lands
Ramah was born in a prayer room. It takes ground in Nabdam District in Ghana's Upper East Region, the same region Patrick grew up in.
According to the Ghana Statistical Service's 2021 Multidimensional Poverty Index, Nabdam is officially the poorest district in all of Ghana, with a poverty rate of 68.6%, nearly three times the national average. Its 84 communities are 100% rural, served by zero doctors, with a 53% adult illiteracy rate and only 12% sanitation coverage. No major international NGO operates a dedicated programme here.
That gap is our mandate.
When you give to Ramah, you are not funding an international agency's overhead. You are funding a team that is already on the ground, in the district, speaking the language. Your gift is the difference between a widow who learns a trade this year and one who waits another decade for help that may never arrive.
Every widow we train, every child we put in school, every savings group we seed: it is all one man's answer to a generosity he cannot repay, except by passing it on. And it is your opportunity to be part of that chain.
"Pure and genuine religion in the sight of God the Father means caring for orphans and widows in their distress." James 1:27 (NLT)