Workneh Bedhane Dechasa was born in Guder in 1960, one of a family of eight and attended elementary school there. His studies took him to Ambo, Kotobe, Moscow and London. He worked as a teacher in Bale, Oromia. From 1991 he worked to to help schools in Camden, London include refugee and asylum seeking children and young people, many of them without parents. He also established channels of communication between the communities and the council and supported a programme of supplementary schools to improve the educational opportunities of recently arrived families. He was also very active in the Oromo community, in London and internationally.
Workneh planned, when he retired, to set up an elementary school on land his family owned in Guder. Children from that community frequently had to travel long distances, sometimes on foot, to attend school. Some children from the poorer families missed out completely. Sadly, in the summer of 2017 he was diagnosed with cancer and on 13th May 2019, his brave struggle with the disease, was lost.
In his memory, his widow, Aster and son Yadata have committed themselves to realising Workneh’s ambition to establish a good quality elementary school in Guder. Their vision is to bring together the wide range of Workneh’s and Aster’s family, friends and colleagues who are living around the world, to engage in fund-raising activities to build and equip the school.