The charcoal seller’s son rejected by 15 medical schools but made it to Forbes 30 under 30 list

While on a sick bed as a child, the young Shadrack Frimpong had only one prayer, that he would not lose his legs saying, "If I can keep these legs, then I will use them and work to help other people.”

Like a silent prayer answered, his legs were saved, thanks to the sacrifice his parents made by putting their farm up as collateral for a loan so that he could get medical treatment.

Today, Shadrack, the son of a mother who sold charcoal, is on his way to Yale Medical School, soon to become the first doctor in his family’s generational line.

Also, his company, Cocoa360, a non-profit in rural Ghana recently completed a multi-million dollar valuation fundraising.

What’s his story?

Shadrack Osei Frimpong was born in 1990 or 1991 at Tarkwa Breman, Ghana. His grew up in a household without running water or electricity.

According to his profile on Wikipedia, at age nine, he experienced a serious infection of his legs that nearly resulted in their amputation.

His parents had to use their farm as collateral for a loan so that he could receive treatment at a hospital five hours away. He recalled hoping and praying during his illness that he would not lose his legs.

When he recovered from his illness, he became passionate about his education, taking his studies much more seriously.

He attended the Opoku Ware School in Kumasi, funded in part by a Ghana Cocoa Board scholarship. In 2015, he graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in biology.

At that point, he became the first person from his village to attend college in the U.S.

In 2018, he returned to the University of Pennsylvania for a master's degree in non-profit leadership. He also holds an Advanced MPH, Global Health, from the Yale School of Public Health's Advanced Professional Program and as of August 2022, he is pursuing a Ph.D. in Public Health and Primary Care at the University of Cambridge.


Shadrack Frimpong has won several awards, including the Queen's Young Leader Award and the Muhammad Ali Humanitarian Award.

He used the $150,000 prize money from the Amy Gutmann's President's Engagement Prize to found his non-profit Cocoa360, where proceeds from a community-run cocoa farm are used to provide free education at the organization's Tarkwa Breman Girls School, and to subsidize healthcare at its medical clinic.

The first school to open under the program did so in 2017, and serves approximately 150 students as of 2019, Wikipedia added.

“As of 2019, Cocoa360 has 60 acres (0.24 km2) of communal land, which consists of the school campus, 10 acres of cocoa farms, and land that is uncultivated. Villagers volunteer labor on the cocoa farm in exchange for tuition-free education at the school and subsidized healthcare.”

In 2019, Frimpong was appointed as an editor of the Yale Journal of Health Policy, Law, and Ethics. He co-founded the African Research Academies for Women, Inc. And also founded the organization’s Students for A Healthy Africa, which provides health insurance to AIDS orphans in Ghana.

Awards and honours:

Shadrack Frimpong was a recipient of the Amy Gutmann's President's Engagement Prize in 2015.

In the same year, he also received the Samuel Huntington Public Service Award, which has had past recipients such as U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy and MacArthur "Genius" Fellow Angela Duckworth.

In 2018, he received the Queen's Young Leader Award. Also in 2018, he received the Boyer Scholarship, becoming the second African recipient and first ever from West Africa. The Boyer Scholarship resulted in him becoming a member of the First Troop Philadelphia City Cavalry.

In 2018, he was named as one of Forbes's "30 under 30" social entrepreneurs for 2019.

See below a post he made on his Facebook page recently:



You can also watch this episode of People & Places on GhanaWeb TV here:



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