Why we built SF Fellows GH.
SF Fellows GH is a fellowship training programme for young Ghanaians. This is the story of how placing trainees led us to a gap in NGO digital access, and why solving it for the NGOs and solving it for the trainees turned out to be the same answer.
SF Fellows GH started as a training programme. We train young Ghanaians in enterprise tools (Salesforce, Google Workspace, Slack) before their first job. The idea is straightforward: close the gap between what Ghanaian employers expect from new hires and what graduates actually know how to use. Each cohort finishes the programme knowing the tools. The problem showed up when they tried to get hired.
Employers wanted experience, not certificates. The missing piece was six months inside a real organisation, on a live system, with real data and real deadlines. An internship. We started looking for NGOs who could take placements. The first conversation told us the rest.
Most NGOs that we talked to used Google Sheets, WhatsApp groups, and a shared folder nobody had touched since the last grant cycle. Beneficiary records lived in spreadsheets. Consent forms sat in a drawer. When a funder asked for numbers disaggregated by district and age band, it meant a long Friday night of manual counting, if it could be done at all. A friend running a 12-person NGO in the Eastern Region had a report due Friday with her data split across six Sheets and a stack of paper consent forms from a rural outreach the week before. She was not going to make it. She could not take a trainee even if she wanted to. There was nothing to put them on.
We heard the same story at three more NGOs that month. None knew Salesforce donates 10 free Enterprise licenses to qualifying nonprofits. None knew Google gives approved NGOs up to USD 10,000 a month in Ad Grants. None knew Canva Nonprofits is free for up to 50 users. All had been told they needed "digital transformation." Two had been quoted GHS 40,000 for a workshop. One had been quoted USD 25,000 for a Salesforce implementation that would have eaten half their programmes budget. The tools were sitting there. Nobody was helping them get in. And without those tools in place, there was nowhere for our trainees to land.
So we built the thing that solves both. We set up the NGOs with the vendor accounts they already qualify for. The NGOs take the trainees. The trainees leave with practical hours, real references, and a live system they helped run. The NGOs keep the system after the placement ends. No commission on the licenses. No reselling. The NGO's out-of-pocket cost is zero or near-zero. That is why this exists.