A Ghana-based youth charity headed by a Bermudian golf pro has joined forces with an educational programme in Bermuda.

Quinton Sherlock Jr said that the Ace It Foundation, which he started in the West African country seven years ago, would now be offering the General Education Development test and life skills development programmes with the Care Learning Centre.

He said: “Having this GED on hand really kind of makes it realistic for the young people to make that transition from being in an environment where they sleep in a room with four other family members with no running water to potentially being a freshman at a university in the US.”

Ghanaian children will be able to take online courses at Care for skills such as budgeting and interview skills.

The change will also come with the Ace It Foundation being rebranded to Children and Adults Reaching For Education Ghana.

Mr Sherlock was speaking during a meeting with the Hamilton Rotary Club at the Royal Hamilton Amateur Dinghy Club in Pembroke.

Mr Sherlock moved to Ghana in 2015 and founded the Ace It Foundation in 2015, which educates and teaches golf to disadvantaged children from Gomoa-Fetteh, Ghana.

Mr Sherlock said that he started off helping the children develop their English language skills, visiting the youngsters for hour-long lessons every day.

He explained that a better vocabulary would improve their academics across the board. “The young people would have to understand the question in order to effectively answer the question,” he said.

Mr Sherlock and his team also gave the children rudimentary golfing lessons to give them a sense of positive reinforcement from “being able to hit these big targets”.

He said: “What we’ll do is 45 minutes of academics, 45 minutes of golf. They’ll be in different groups and then we’ll rotate them.

“Once their proficiency got up to a particular level, we were then able to transport them to the capital city of Accra on weekends.

“We would rent a bus with about 15 to 20 young people and take them to an actual golf course in the city, where they’ll get to learn and play the more formal sides of golf.”

Mr Sherlock said that weekly visits to Accra for the youngsters was “enlightening”, particularly since some of their parents had never been in the city before.

He explained: “When we entered that community in 2015, none of the young people who we worked with knew who Tiger Woods was, as popular as we may think he is.

“Even today in 2023, none of the children in our programme have running water.”

Mr Sherlock added: “After a year or so of work we were retaining the young people, we were seeing improvements in their academics and some were even becoming quite proficient in golf for a junior level.”

Mr Sherlock said that the charity had since become an academic after-school programme that now taught STEM subjects.