Our History
The Isaac Moghalu Foundation
The Isaac Moghalu Foundation(IMoF) is a non-profit organization established to support access to education in underprivileged rural and urban communities in Nigeria. IMoF also supports educational institutions, skills training, community development and leadership training. The headquarters of IMoF is in Nnewi, Anambra State of Nigeria.
The Isaac Moghalu Foundation
The Isaac Moghalu Foundation was established in memory of Elder Isaac C. Moghalu (1925-1998), one of Nigeria’s pioneer diplomats and a retired Permanent Secretary at the time of his transition. The foundation was inspired by a felt need to build on the legacy of Elder Moghalu’s life by offering an alternative of education and the positive values that he espoused and practiced in his lifetime to vulnerable youth in the rural communities where he spent his retirement year, and for which he had a burning passion. The match between his inspiration and the reality of Africa’s socio-economic condition of poverty resulted in the establishment of the Isaac Moghalu Foundation as a concrete and sustainable response.
Dr. Kinsley Moghalu, a former United Nations official and the first of Isaac Moghalu’s five children founded the Isaac Moghalu Foundation with support of members and friends of the Moghalu family. IMoF was established with a small seed endowment. The Foundation will work to attract significant counterpart resources and other support to achieve its goals for rural communities.
Isaac Moghalu
The late Isaac Moghalu, Justice of the Peace, was born in 1925 in Nnewi, Nigeria to Mr. Jonathan Moghalu, a carpenter and a Madame Cecilia Moghalu, the first woman to become a professional painter in the then Eastern Nigeria. He was educated at Dennis Memorial Grammar School in the eastern Nigerian commercial city of Onitsha, one of the prestigious church mission secondary schools in Nigeria’s colonial era, the Polytechnic at Ibadan, where he received a Diploma in Public Administration from the University of Exeter, and the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva where he obtained a Diploma in International Law, Diplomacy and French, with distinction.
Isaac was a lifelong public servant. He began his career in 1950 as a Tutor at the Okongwu Memorial Grammar School, Nnewi and later worked as a clerk in the civil service of the Eastern Region. Upon his graduation from the Polytechnic at Ibadan he joined Nigeria’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Lagos in 1961 as a Foreign Service Officer. He served as a diplomat in Geneva from 1963-1964 and at the embassy of Nigeria in Washington, DC from 1964 to 1967.
Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.
President Barack Obama
Returning to the Eastern Region as a result of the outbreak of civil war in 1967 he served in the Cabinet Office and in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Biafra during the civil war. Following a succession of senior administrative positions in various ministries in East Central state and Anambra State upon its creation in 1976, Isaac retired from the civil service as he Permanent Secretary in Nnewi, where he lived until his death in 1998.
He left a legacy of integrity, humility and social action in the various communities with which he was associated in his lifetime. Isaac Moghalu devoted much of his retirement years to Christian evangelism and community service and was an active member of the Full Gospel Businessmen’s International Fellowship.
He was married to Lady Vidah Moghalu for 36 years and they had five children.