Meet Richard Acheampong: the lawyer rebuilding sanitation in Africa.

When Richard Kojo Acheampong returned to Nkonya Senior High School in Ghana's Oti Region with his wife Joan, they expected to see the place that had shaped them. They saw something else. The girls' washroom had been broken for more than a decade. A 25-unit toilet block sat half-finished. Students were managing without privacy, without water, without dignity.

They did not write a cheque to a charity. They built it themselves. In 120 days, with their own money, they delivered 37 sanitation units, a roofed walkway and a working water system. The total spend doubled from an early estimate of about fifteen thousand US dollars to more than thirty thousand as the scope grew. Richard and Joan absorbed every overrun.

That single project at his old school became the seed of Sanitopia, the UK Community Interest Company and Ghana non-profit Richard founded in 2025 to scale the model. The ambition is not modest. Sanitopia aims to build 10,000 sanitation projects across Africa by 2035, with more than two thousand of them in Ghana.

An unlikely founder

Richard's path to philanthropy did not run through wealth or privilege. He moved to the United Kingdom from Ghana in 1998. Soon after arriving, a severe car accident resulted in the amputation of one of his feet. While he was still in hospital, immigration authorities threatened to deport him. He could not find conventional employment, partly because of his immigration status and partly because of his injury.

So in 2002 he started a business. Then another. By the time he qualified as a solicitor of the Senior Courts of England and Wales in 2016, he had already built ventures that employed hundreds of people. He also qualified as a lawyer of the Supreme Court of Ghana, holding dual practice rights in both jurisdictions.

In 2025 he published Crushed But Not Destroyed, a memoir documenting how he turned adversity into a long career. All royalties from the book are channelled directly into Sanitopia projects.

Why sanitation

Across sub-Saharan Africa, more than seventeen percent of the population still practises open defecation. In Ghana the figure sits stubbornly around one in five households, and rural schools are among the worst affected. The World Bank estimates the country loses close to half a billion US dollars every year to the consequences of poor sanitation, from medical bills to lost workdays to children missing class.

For girls the cost is even heavier. Without privacy or proper facilities to manage menstrual hygiene, many simply stop attending during their periods. The gap in education outcomes widens year by year. Richard saw all of that play out in real time at Nkonya.

Communities that give us everything deserve something back. Sanitation is not charity. It is infrastructure, and it is dignity.

A business mindset, applied to charity

Sanitopia is deliberately not run like a traditional non-profit. Every project goes through gate reviews. Budgets are tracked against milestones. Contractors are paid against delivery, not promises. The model came out of Richard's two decades of entrepreneurship in the UK, and it shows in the metrics. The pilot at Nkonya hit a 100 percent completion rate. So has every project since.

The board is small. Decisions move quickly. Richard oversees each site personally, often flying back to Ghana between his UK legal practice and Sanitopia commitments. The May 2026 expansion mission, currently in planning, will see him meeting partners across Accra, Kumasi and the regional capitals.

What comes next

Sanitopia has already secured a partnership with the Ghana Library Authority covering public library facilities nationwide. The George Padmore Research Library in Accra has been delivered. School-by-school expansion in the Oti, Volta and Greater Accra regions is the immediate priority. Beyond Ghana, Richard is in early conversations with partners in Nigeria, Kenya and Rwanda.

Sanitopia's longer goal is to evolve into a construction organisation owned in spirit by the communities it serves, capable of delivering infrastructure that lasts for generations. The aim is not just to build toilets. It is to prove that African sanitation can be planned, financed and delivered by Africans, to a standard the rest of the world will eventually copy.

For Richard, the work is personal in a way most founders never quite manage. The school whose washrooms he rebuilt is the school that gave him his foundation. The country he is investing in is the country he came from. And the lesson he carried out of his hospital bed all those years ago, that being crushed is not the same as being destroyed, has now become a charter for thousands of children he will never meet.