The Board of Challenging Heights (CH) has approved a comprehensive package of governance reforms following two days of deliberations in Accra, in what the organisation describes as the most significant restructuring of its governance architecture in its twenty-year history.

The reforms reconstitute the organisation's governance structure, strengthen safeguarding and data protection systems, tighten procurement controls, place succession planning on a constitutional footing, and commission an independent evaluation of the organisation's impact over the past decade.

At the heart of the changes is a clear separation between governance and management. The former Advisory Board has been reconstituted as a Board of Directors with unambiguous supervisory and fiduciary authority, while the senior management body previously known as the Management Board becomes the Management Committee, responsible for day-to-day operations and reporting to the Board. The role of the organisation's executive leadership, previously designated President, becomes Executive Director.

The constitutional review also establishes formal succession planning provisions, addressing a risk common to founder-led organisations and one that funders and regulators increasingly expect to see managed rather than assumed.

The new Board of Directors is chaired by Professor Mavis Amo-Mensah. Its other members are Dr Lawrencia Aggrey-Bluwey, who serves as Acting Treasurer; Kenneth Mammudu; Linda Ataa Osabutey; and James Kofi Annan, who serves as Executive Director and Secretary to the Board. Dr Aggrey-Bluwey has been appointed Acting Treasurer pending the appointment of a substantive Treasurer, who the Board has determined must hold a professional background in finance or accounting.

The Board also approved a strengthened organisational safeguarding policy framework, reaffirming that the protection of children and young people in the organisation's care governs every aspect of its work. A comprehensive data protection framework was adopted, establishing how the organisation collects, classifies, stores, uses and discloses personal information, with particular protection for the records of survivors of trafficking. The framework is grounded in the Data Protection Act, 2012 (Act 843), and includes a classification system under which the most sensitive beneficiary records are subject to the highest level of restriction.

Further reforms to procurement systems were approved, strengthening documentation requirements, competitive processes, and the audit trail behind the award of contracts.

Perhaps most significantly, the Board has authorised the commissioning of an independent evaluation of the organisation's programmes, systems and institutional development covering the period 2016 to 2026. The evaluation will replicate the survey instruments used in a 2016 impact study in the same communities so that change over the decade can be measured rather than estimated. It will also extend into areas the earlier study could not reach, including destination communities on Lake Volta, the long-term outcomes of people rescued and reintegrated between 2015 and 2020, the organisation's visibility and standing among communities and institutions, and its governance, financial and safeguarding systems.

The Chair of the Board of Directors, Professor Mavis Amo-Mensah, said the reforms were about durability. "Challenging Heights has done twenty years of difficult and important work, and the Board's responsibility is to ensure that the institution is stronger than any individual within it. Clear supervisory authority, credible succession planning, rigorous safeguarding and data protection, and an independent evaluation that we do not control the conclusions of — these are the things that allow an organisation to outlast its founders."

James Kofi Annan, who founded Challenging Heights in 2005 after escaping seven years of child slavery on Lake Volta, said the most useful thing he could now do was to make the organisation less dependent on him. "Commissioning an evaluation whose findings I cannot edit, and submitting to a Board with clear authority over the executive, are not concessions. They are how we prove that what we say about children's protection is matched by how we run ourselves."

Challenging Heights has grown from a small grassroots effort into one of Ghana's leading child protection organisations, rescuing children from trafficking and forced labour on Lake Volta, providing rehabilitation and reintegration support, and working with communities to prevent exploitation. The organisation supports hundreds of children and their families each year and runs a school with more than 700 students who are survivors of trafficking or at risk of being trafficked.