Workneh Bedhane Dechasa was born in Guder, Oromia, Ethiopia in 1960, one of a family of eight, and attended elementary school there. He worked as a teacher in Bale, Oromia and his studies took him to Ambo, Kotobe, Moscow and London.
From 1991 he worked to for Camden Education Authority in London, helping schools to successfully include refugee and asylum-seeking children and young people, many of them unaccompanied by adults. 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 owns in Malkaa Dhagaa-Gudar. 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, on 31 August 2016 he was diagnosed with cancer and on 13 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 families, friends and colleagues who are living around the world, to engage in fund-raising activities to build and equip the school.
Workneh was a unique character – principled, professional, reflective, sociable, compassionate, humorous and generous. For these reasons, over the course of his life, Workneh drew to him a diverse group of friends and colleagues, all of whom miss him dearly, and wish to contribute their time and energy to making this project a success.