It all started in 2004 when Gift100 co-founder Stephanie Campbell travelled to Ghana in her Gap year. Whilst working on community projects such as building houses from mud bricks and assisting in a village nursery school, Stephanie stayed with a local Ghanaian family with whom she become very good friends.

For Christmas 2005, she returned to Ghana to visit her friends who she had kept in touch with. Prior to leaving the UK, several family friends had expressed their interest in Stephanie’s past voluntary work and suggested they send money with her to Ghana in order to assist and complete another project.

As promised, a small toilet block at the nursery school that Stephanie worked at in 2004 was finished, complete with connections to water supply and drains to enable the toilets to flush. This has improved health and sanitation for the children attending this nursery and due to prudent use of funds there was money left over for clearing a play area and installing a custom built round-a-bout for the kids to play on. In addition to this, new matching uniforms were made for the kids as some parents were not able to afford to buy their child a uniform themselves.

So impresssed were family and friends with this achievement, especially with the tight financial controls imposed, that they then expressed further interest in investing in more ambitious projects in the same area.

With a third visit to Ghana in 2007-2008, Stephanie was able to build up her relationship with the same village by being introduced to the new chief of that village by her original host mother Molly. This was followed with a surprise visit by her Dad (and Gift100 co-founder Alistair Campbell), who was introduced by Stephanie to the village and it’s Chief. Alistair presented educational gifts to the village high school (again donated from friends in the UK) and it was from here that the idea of creating a charity to support these generous donations was instigated and Gift100 was born.

The charity was officially launched in the UK with an awareness and fundraising event in 2008 which was hosted by Alistair & Lesley Campbell. Guests of honour were Chief Nana Poma Kwaadua XVIII and his wife Dora Kumi-Darko from the village of Akatekyiwa which is the first village to benefit from the charity’s work.