Penn honors Ghanaian immigrant who rose from baker to hospital executive

Robert Asante has walked long roads, and not just as a kid from the family cocoa farm in Ghana. His journey has taken him from hourly jobs around Southwest Philadelphia’s “Little Africa” neighborhood to the advanced degrees he earned at Penn and Drexel. His latest destination: his current post as chief privacy officer at ChristianaCare, Delaware’s largest hospital network.

Now he’s trying to shorten at least the first part of that journey for those who follow by literally building a road.

Asante, 50, has set up Our Foundations, a nonprofit that is building a new road along the three-and-a-half-mile forest trail he took to get to elementary school as a child, plus branches to nearby settlements.

On Saturday, Penn’s Graduate School of Education honored Asante with its Kwame Nkrumah Distinguished Alumni Award, recognizing his efforts to build “equality and economic development” in Ghana through his new foundation, according to Pam Grossman, dean of the school, where Asante earned his doctorate in 2019.

It is, the Penn official said, a coincidence that the award is named for Ghana’s first president. Starting in the 1930s, the future President Nkrumah earned two degrees from Lincoln University in Chester County, then two more from Penn, before returning home to join the struggle for independence.

Asante said education had been more an aspiration than an expectation when he was growing up in the 1980s in the village of Nyamebekyere, about 170 miles by road from Accra, the capital of Ghana. “My father didn’t go to school. My mother didn’t go to school. We lived on a cocoa farm. I was a farmer until age 26,” he recalled last week.

Elementary school meant an hour walk each way to the next village, Yareyeya. “In those days it was all equatorial forest. The farmers made paths, through the hills, crossing streams,” Asante said. Later he boarded at a high school in Bogoso, a crossroads mining village 10 miles north. Then it was back to the farm.

The family had connections: His uncle Nana Nkwantabisa III was head electrician for the public waterworks in Accra. Another uncle, Kwame Kwateng, worked for Ghana’s trade ministry. When Asante turned 26, in 1998, his father sent him to live with that uncle, who prodded him to take a British correspondence course and set up an interview with U.S. consular officials. He was approved for a visa to work in the U.S.

He would need a sponsor. A member of his church had a friend in Southwest Philly. That friend, Richard Ankrah, let Asante stay with him at 61st Street and Kingsessing Avenue, so Asante could assure the U.S. government he wouldn’t require public aid.

He went to work at a Denny’s. “I was a dishwasher, I cleaned the bathrooms,” he said. After six months, the manager praised his hard work and suggested Asante apply for a better-paid union job at Amoroso’s Baking Co., then at 55th and Baltimore. Asante was soon making rolls for Wawa and hoagie shops.

He started computer classes at DPT Business School in Old City. “I finished their courses. But nobody would give you a computer job unless you had a computer job before. So I volunteered at Drexel University,” Asante said.

Drexel’s medical school used Hahnemann University Hospital as a teaching site. “They sent me to help with the systems migration. I worked there six months without pay,” he said. He’d check out of Amoroso at 7 a.m., go home for coffee, head to Hahnemann on the trolley, then back to sleep before his bakery shift at 11 p.m.

Finally, Janice Biros, a Drexel vice president, called Asante to her office. “She says, ‘Robert, I’m going to give you a job, and I need you to go to school.’ I was very happy, after working for free,” he said.

They tried him on the university’s help desk. And he enrolled in Drexel’s undergraduate computer technology program. Working days and studying nights, he graduated in 2006. Two years later he married Serena Vaughn, whom he met at church.

Carl “Tobey” Oxholm, then general counsel for Drexel, noticed Asante: “He had a spark in his eyes and brought energy to the conversation. He showed he could do more.” Oxholm urged Asante to consider business school. After blowing his Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT), Asante took a prep course at Penn, scored better, and enrolled in Drexel’s MBA program.

Asante graduated to run an information security group at Citibank in Delaware. Serena, caring for their young daughter Jada and son Cletus, objected to his long hours. So he returned to Drexel, was named interim chief privacy officer, and on the side designed and taught courses in health information technology and privacy and information security.

He liked teaching and found a top-rated education doctoral program next door at Penn. He impressed Wharton School marketing instructor Chuck Kanupke. “He started here from scratch and pulled himself up by the bootstraps — the classic Horatio Alger story,” Kanupke recalled.

Last year, Asante started Our Foundations and recruited Kanupke to the board. Vice chair is Ronald Davis, a Jamaica-born BNY Mellon executive. Davis, active in African charities, said he was glad to join: “Robert has an interest in people. When he asks you to help, you want to help.”

At ChristianaCare, Asante leads a team of five analysts who coordinate hospital departments to protect patient records under state and federal rules. Beyond his expertise, “his superpower is his ability to collaborate and engage people” in any initiative, said his boss, general counsel Jennifer Schwartz.

Last year, Asante and his board hosted a visit from his uncle Nana Nkwantabisa III, now a village chief. “Growing up in a village in Ghana is very difficult,” Nkwantabisa said in a talk Asante recorded. “This road should be a blessing to every parent. There will be access to education, to improve the living standards of the people. There will be work. And easy access to the clinics.”

He said he warned Asante of many obstacles. “And he just told me, ‘I know, I’ll try my best. When God has served you to attend this height, you have to do it.’”

Asante said he has so far raised around $40,000, more than half from his own pocket. Later last year, they rented an excavator and built more than three miles of roadbed. They are a long way from finished: The district government wants hills graded before cars are allowed.

“It’s been a long road,” Asante concluded. “But people like me are coming along every day. They need opportunity and support to get up to the next level. That is what we wish to give them.”