Long before she became a recognised entrepreneur and leadership coach, Mary Anane Awuku was a compound prefect in junior high school - a role she credits as the starting point of a trajectory that would shape her professional confidence for decades. Speaking on The Career Trail, a programme aired on Joy Learning TV and Joy News, Awuku made a pointed case to young Ghanaians: leadership is not a destination reserved for the exceptionally gifted or the already powerful. It is a practice, and it begins wherever you are.
A Leadership Path Built One Role at a Time
Awuku's account of her early years offers a clear illustration of how leadership identity develops incrementally. At junior high school, she served as head of the grounds - a prefectship concerned with the physical upkeep and order of the school compound. It is the kind of role that rarely appears on a résumé later in life, yet its function is formative: it requires accountability, consistency, and the management of peers who may not always be cooperative.
At St Mary's Senior High School, she served as SRC Secretary, then extended her reach beyond the school gates to represent Zone 9 of Greater Accra's inter-school student representative structure - a body that brought together multiple secondary schools under a regional organisational framework. "I was the secretary for Zone 9 which was also a collection of different secondary schools coming together," she explained. A subsequent bid for Greater Accra regional SRC Secretary ended in defeat - she lost to a candidate from Accra Academy - but Awuku frames that outcome not as a setback that closed doors, but as one that reinforced her resolve.
The pattern continued at university, where she served as a hall president and participated in multiple committees. "Even in the university I was a voter hall president. Before that I was part of different committees as well. You know I don't like just belonging to a group. What impact are you making?" she reflected.
Why Early Leadership Experience Carries Long-Term Weight
The connection between early leadership participation and adult professional confidence is well-established in educational development literature, even if the mechanisms are sometimes underappreciated. Student leadership roles are, at their core, practical training grounds for communication, negotiation, public accountability, and decision-making under social pressure. A student who stands before peers to give a report, mediates a dispute in a dormitory, or organises an inter-school event is practising the same competencies that executives, policymakers, and entrepreneurs draw on daily.
Awuku speaks to this directly. She attributes the confidence she now brings to professional interactions - including engagements with older, more senior individuals - to the accumulated weight of those early experiences. "Even when I am dealing with older people, there is no intimidation. I am not shy. I am able to speak out confidently," she said. This is not a small claim. For many young professionals, particularly women entering competitive sectors in Ghana and across the continent, the ability to assert oneself in rooms where one is younger, newer, or in the minority is a significant and often hard-won skill.
Awuku has applied this understanding within her own family, actively encouraging nephews and nieces currently at junior high, senior high, and university levels to pursue student leadership positions - treating it not as an optional ambition but as a deliberate developmental strategy.
The Broader Case for Student Participation in Ghana's Schools
Ghana's secondary and tertiary institutions have long maintained formal student representative structures - Student Representative Councils at the secondary level and various hall and student union bodies at university. These structures exist not merely as administrative conveniences but as civic infrastructure: spaces where young people learn that authority comes with responsibility, that representation requires listening, and that failure in a public role is survivable and instructive.
Yet there is a persistent tendency among students to treat membership in these structures as the domain of a particular type of person - the naturally outspoken, the socially dominant, or the already-popular. Awuku's message pushes back firmly against that narrowing. Her own entry point was a compound prefectship, not a headline position. Her advice is correspondingly practical: "Don't hide in your shell... try to do something, even if it's a small group. Be part of some form of group where you make a positive impact to the people that you serve."
The value of this counsel extends beyond personal development. Communities, institutions, and workplaces consistently benefit when people entering them have already learned how to take initiative, manage others, and speak up constructively. A student who has held even a minor leadership role arrives at adulthood having already rehearsed those behaviours in a relatively low-stakes environment. That rehearsal matters.
Leadership as Character, Not Just Position
What distinguishes Awuku's perspective from generic motivational advice is its specificity and its honesty. She does not claim an unbroken record of success. She lost a significant election. She held roles that most people would consider minor. She did not wait for a prestigious position before deciding she was a leader. And she connects all of it - directly, without romanticisation - to who she became professionally.
Her closing message to students is worth taking seriously in its simplicity: "Nobody's an island." It is a reminder that leadership, at every level, is relational. It is exercised in the service of others, built through exposure, and refined through repetition. The compound prefect who learns to manage shared spaces with fairness is already practising something real. The secretary who takes minutes at a zonal SRC meeting is already building habits of precision and procedure. None of it is wasted.
