Why this Project is Important

Potential Long Term Impact

The project will educate 20 girls: graduating the 10th grade qualifies girls for a range of professions, including teaching and civil service, allowing them and their families an escape from subsistence agriculture that reinforces cycles of poverty.

Project Message

Education is the only sustainable, long term solution to help rural Mozambican girls overcome the many obstacles they face.
- Macame B. Macame, Executive Director, Lurdes Mutola Foundation

Who is Running This Project

Organization

Lurdes Mutola Foundation Av. Julius Nyerere N.931 1st Floor, Door 2 Maputo, Maputo CP 2441 Mozambique +258 21 487717 http://www.flmutola.org.mz

Learn more about Lurdes Mutola Foundation and the project team.

Lurdes Mutola Foundation's Current Projects on GlobalGiving

Not Just Soccer for Youth/Coaches in Mozambique

Where this Project is Located

Country

This project is located in Mozambique and can also be found under Children.

For more information about Mozambique, read the Human Development Report on Mozambique or the Wikipedia entry for Mozambique.

When this Project was Updated

Last Updated

This project was last updated on December 19, 2008.

Date Added to GlobalGiving

This project was added to the GlobalGiving project catalog on November 07, 2007.

Latest Update from the Field

First year of "More School for Me" completed

By Kevin Block - Education Programs Officer, December 19, 2008 04:07 PM

Year 1 of Mais Escola Para Mim (MEpM) is now complete and the Lurdes Mutola Foundation is proud to say that its dormitory immersion model for improving the academic performance of rural Mozambican girls works, pure and simple. Once acclimated to the new living conditions, our inaugural group of 18 scholarship recipients grew both as students and as young women. Not only did they all pass the 8th grade, but year-end grades demonstrated that they outperformed their peers at the Magude Secondary School on average in every discipline. They grew physically with a steady, healthy diet. They matured psychologically in a surrogate home that fosters sorority and self-confidence. After only a year of hard work, it’s not too much to say that they’ve started to set the groundwork of their personal dreams and, in some remarkable cases, bring entire villages into development.
And so LMF has decided to expand the program. Immediately after the girls went home for summer holidays at the end of October, the Foundation began constructing a new dormitory complex that will provide us with a facility that can comfortably house forty scholarship recipients and two live-in coordinators. All 18 girls that are now ready for 9th grade completed re-initiation applications alongside grateful and supportive parents and will be returning in 2009 to work with head social worker Marianna Mario Manhique. Joining them will be a new group of 20 8th graders from the most rural villages in Magude District in the Maputo province. On December 10th and 11th a team of LMF employees, accompanied by local school officials who could vouch for MEpM’s effectiveness, traveled the Mozambican back roads to Panjane, Mahele, Mapinlanguene, Manjane, Nwambyana, Motaze, and Marule in an attempt to reach out to those aspiring young women the greatest logistical and economic needs. In Mahele we recruited the first girl in the community’s history to pass 7th grade. In Mapinlanguene, we found a precocious 12 year old named Velosa with reading and writing abilities equal to children many years her senior. In Motaze, where several members of the 2008 class live, we entered a classroom full of interested families eager to have their daughters apply.
Of course, such promising success does not mean that there aren’t areas of MEpM in which the Foundation can improve. In Year 2 we hope to provide tutoring and additional materials that will further increase academic performance, especially in math and the sciences. The bigger group will also create greater logistical challenges, and we hope to find ways to make the dormitory complex less reliant on the LMF office in Maputo and more integrated into the Magude community. We would also like to include a fuller slate of special weekend activities.
It’s exciting to see this project and these girls grow. Please check back with our Global Giving page for future, more regular updates.

Links:

• Funding Foundation in California that support's LMF.

• End of the year banquet in October 2008.
• One of the new MEpM dormitories in December 2008.
• Velosa Joao Cossa filling out her 2009 MEpM application in Mapul

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