Why We Registered as a UK Charity

The Hope Education Project Ghana NPO has been registered and operating since 2022. It has run a successful schools pilot across Tamale’s junior high schools, launched the SOMA Girls’ Empowerment Programme, recruited a survivor advocate with lived experience of trafficking, and established active research partnerships with three US universities. The programme works. The evidence is building. The demand to scale is real.

But scaling an NGO in Ghana is hard. The funding landscape for international development work has shifted significantly – UK trusts and foundations, corporate donors, and institutional funders increasingly require a regulated UK organisation to award grants to. Gift Aid alone – the ability to reclaim 25p on every £1 donated by a UK taxpayer – makes a material difference to a small charity’s income.

Registering the UK charity was therefore a deliberate strategic decision: to remove the structural barriers that were limiting our ability to raise money in the UK, and to create the platform from which we can grow the Ghana programme to the scale the need demands: one charity, two entities, one mission.

Who Is Building the UK Charity

Since registration, we have moved quickly to put the right people in place. Our UK senior team currently includes a Strategy and Governance Director, an Income Generation and Grants Director, a Social Media Strategy Director, and a Grant Research Volunteer, as well as a small team of social media volunteers led by our Youth Engagement Advisor. We are in the final stages of appointing a Chairman of the Trustees, and our Board of Trustees, five members with backgrounds spanning international development, education, and programme delivery, provides governance oversight of the charity’s direction.

The charity is founded and led by Angus Thomas, a British practitioner who has worked on human trafficking in West Africa since 2019. He currently divides his time between Tamale, embedded in the community where our programmes are delivered. Behind him is an advisory panel of specialists in trafficking, migration policy, data intelligence, and survivor advocacy – including an Obama Foundation Fellow, a University of Warwick research fellow, a Cambridge PhD, and the former Head of Data and AI at the global anti-trafficking charity STOP THE TRAFFIK.

→ Meet the team.     → Meet our advisory panel.      → Read the founder’s story

Built on Evidence

Academic research sits at the core of the Ghana programme. We are partnered with the University of Texas at Arlington, the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis, and the Global Centre on Human Trafficking at Montclair State University on five active research projects. Our first peer-reviewed publication is expected in Q2 2026.

The UK charity structure strengthens our credibility with academic partners and institutional funders who expect the organisations they work with to meet recognised governance standards.

→ Read about our research partnerships

What Comes Next

The UK charity’s immediate priority is building a sustainable funding base for the Ghana programme, covering facilitator salaries, training, curriculum development, and the research costs that generate the evidence our funders and partners need. Beyond that, the structure we are building is designed to support geographic expansion: the Hope Education Project model has already attracted interest from Uganda and Nigeria, and the frameworks we are putting in place now are intended to carry that growth.

We are at an early and formative stage. The people joining us now, as donors, volunteers, or trustees, are joining a charity that is small enough for their contribution to be directly visible, and early enough to genuinely shape what it becomes.