textbooks, and technological equipment to academic institutions in various english-speaking countries in Africa. Please join us in this movement!
Organization News A 20-foot container of over 8,000 books donated by The Vine Group USA was safely delivered to University of Ibadan on October 14, 2008. Congratulations to all those that contributed to these effort!
Learn About the Organization and its Leadership
Chairman, Mehki Phifer President, Prof. Henry Akintunde
Click below to watch a message from our chairman
TVG Overview The Vine Group USA Inc (TVG) is a 501(c) (3) non-profit organization established in 2000 to provide educational resources to tertiary institutions in Sub-Saharan Africa in order to alleviate poverty and help in building a workforce necessary for a sustainable economic development. We at TVG believe in poverty reduction through quality education and gender equality.
Why is Quality Education the Key to Poverty Reduction? The answer can be derived from:
- The skills provided by basic education, such as ability to read and write, have a fundamental outcome on development.
Education can help to displace other negative features of society, such as, crisis of religion and politics.
- Education has a powerful role in empowering those who suffer from multiple disadvantages, such as gender disparity.
- Education that is universal, attained by all, regardless of class or caste or gender, has a powerful impact in addressing social and economic barriers within a society and is central to realizing human freedoms.
Synopsis of the Problem
About 15 years ago, The 1990 Conference on Education for All pledged to achieve universal primary education by 2000. Ten years later, 104 million school-age children were still not in school, 57 percent of them girls and 94 percent were in developing countries - mostly in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. Albeit the number of poor is expected to increase from 314 million in 2001 to 366 million people by 2015 in Sub-Saharan Africa, the data on the region may obscure true situations in most countries. One needs to look at specific country data to see how serious the problem of poverty is. The table below illustrates the dimension of poverty.
The Vine Intervention
The mission of The Vine Group USA, Inc. is "poverty reduction through quality education and gender equality", one institution, one country, at a time. TVG focuses on revitalization, restoration, and modernization of tertiary institutions because they serve as the building block for proper resource allocation that is necessary for poverty reduction. According to a study by UNESCO/OECD, "investing in secondary and tertiary education - and not just primary education - pays rich dividends, and by raising the level of post-secondary educational attainment, increased human capital can translate into steady economic growth."
Since its inception, TVG has donated over $5 million worth of books, computers, and scholarships to The Polytechnic, Ibadan; Ladoke Akintola University of Technology; Olabisi Onabanjo University; Interlink Polytechnic; and University of Ibadan (in Nigeria); The University of Malawi; and University of Ghana. Our plan is to add couple of universities each year to the list of recipients.
Our Mission
The Mission of TVG is to assist in the provision of Quality Education and Gender Equality in Sub-Saharan Africa -- one institution, one country, at a time.
