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Mershack Kabu Aklie (Cowrieking) is a Ghanaian documentary photographer, humanitarian, and founder of the Eyes of Hope Foundation. His work bridges African heritage, social impact, and visual storytelling — turning every photograph into a return for the families he documents.

Mershack Kabu Aklie — known by his community as Cowrieking — is a Ghanaian-born photographer, storyteller, and humanitarian whose practice spans documentary photography, cultural preservation, and grassroots development across West Africa and the diaspora. From the estuary of Ada Foah, where he learned the patience of fishermen and the language of cowries, he has built a body of work that treats the camera as an instrument of dignity rather than extraction. As founder of the Eyes of Hope Foundation and creative director of Adanobi Studios, he reinvests every print sold and every assignment booked into scholarships, family stipends, environmental projects, and oral history archives. His subjects are not anonymous — they are named, paid, and kept in conversation.

Mershack Kabu Aklie is the founder of the Eyes of Hope Foundation, principal of Adanobi Studios, and one of West Africa's most quietly insistent documentary photographers. Born in Ada Foah on the southeastern coast of Ghana, he came to photography late and obliquely — through a broken Yashica left in the family doorway by a returning neighbour. The first photograph he ever made was of his grandmother laughing in the morning light. He did not yet know it had made him a different kind of person. In the years that followed, he worked the Tema docks, taught a small night class for fishermen's children, and quietly built a practice grounded in three commitments: dignity, return, and witness. Today his work appears in private collections, university archives, and the homes of subjects he photographed twenty years ago. He maintains active studios in Ada and Accra and continues fieldwork across Ghana, Togo, Senegal, and the diaspora.