Maunga Primary School
We recently repainted the nursery school and donated learning and teaching materials to the teachers and learners at the school. The bright, warm, and vibrant colours at the school aid in creating a stimulating learning environment at the school. The teaching materials are equipping the teacher with additional teaching aids and posters that they can use in class to help with teaching critical skills like reading and writing. Additionally, we have repaired 40 desks and chairs at the school.
This year we also started providing sanitary pads to girls at school. Girls miss an average of 90 school days a year when they are on their periods and do not have access to sanitary products. By providing them with sanitary pads we are actively tackling period poverty in this community and ensuring that no one gets left behind. We have seen 100% school attendance since we started providing sanitary pads to girls in school.
We have kicked off the Young Farmers Club at Maunga Primary School. Learners from the school are learning agriculture skills through planting and taking care of crops grown at the local school garden. This garden is equipping learners with practical skills that they can use at home to grow a vegetable garden to support their families. Daily, learners will water and weed the garden. The crops harvested from the garden are used to supplement the daily nutrition program that is running at the school. We managed to harvest around 15kgs of tomatoes for use in the feeding program and we are now planting tomatoes, okra, and cabbage. Our next step is to install drip irrigation for the garden to assist with the water supply at the garden. This will cost us $600.
Khwai Pre School
The nutrition program at the school continues to provide daily meals to the learners encouraging them to come to school and providing them with extra food to take home at the end of the day. We built a dining area at the school. We conducted maintenance at the school which included replacing the solar system and installing a borehole in the school providing fresh water to the school so the teachers don't have to go fetch water from the river. Our next steps are to expand the school premises by extending the fence and moving the jungle gym. This will cost us $96,000
Mambanje Primary school
We have made significant progress on our 2023 renovation plans for Mambanje Primary School.
We have completed the rewiring of the school which allowed us to connect solar power to the school. The availability of electricity with ensure that the lights are working and that the school has power for the computer lab. Our next step is to repair the doors and windows at the school.
Thank you for continuing to partner with us as we strive to make a positive impact in the lives of the learners and teachers at our schools.
As we wrap up Q1 for 2023, we are thrilled to see our learners back to school in their numbers for Q2. Our nutrition programs at Khwai, Mambanje, and Maunga schools continue to provide daily meals to learners to ensure that they can focus and concentrate at school and are not learning on an empty stomach.
We are determined to end the period poverty at our schools and have started providing sanitary pads to girls at the Maunga school so none of them is missing school due to lack of access to sanitary pads. We will also extend this to Botswana in the coming weeks.
The repainting of the nursery school and primary school has made the school so much brighter and warmer and vibrant for the learners and staff.
Renovations in Mambanje are ongoing. We have completed fixing the room, walls and floors and have now shifted our focus to rewiring the schools and fixing the electricity. From here we will fix the borehole and teachers’ accommodation. The upcoming renovations are estimated to cost about $73,000.
We have kicked off the planning for the building of the teacher’s accommodation at Maunga School. The number of teachers has increased from 3 to 13 over the past 12 months, with 6 currently sleeping in one of the classrooms. Building teacher’s accommodation at Maunga will allow us to retain the teachers currently based at the school, significantly contributing to the high quality, focused, and attentive learning the learners are receiving.
This building project will cost us $167,000
Thank you for continuing to partner with us as we make a positive impact in the lives of the learners and teachers at our schools.
This month we kicked off our back to school campaign for our schools in Zimbabwe, Zambia and Botswana where we collected and distributed stationery packs to our learners in preperation for the 2023 school year.
It warmed our hearts to see the learners so excited to have new stationery for school. Many of our kids are turns away from school because they don’t have pencils and note books to use in class and the school doesn’t have enough resources to support all the learners. We are really grateful for moments like these as a foundation where we together with our donors and partners can ensure that no learner gets left behind in school this year.
Each learner received a stationery pack with notebooks, pencils, pens, crayons, ruler and sharpener. So often we take for granted being able to buy stationery for work and school but for many of these children this is a first for them at the beginning of school year to have something new to work with. Watching our safari guide Godwin from our Somalisa camp teaching the little ones how to use a sharpener by sharpening a stick, is such a powerful reminder of the impact we constantly strive to make in our schools: to educate and to empower our learners to succeed.
Thank you for the ongoing support and donations towards our education intiatives and projects.
As we begin the last academic term for 2022, we would like to share some updates from our schools in Zimbabwe, Zambia and Botswana
Maunga Primary school Zambia
We kicked started the four-term by launching a feeding scheme at the school where we are feeding over 150 learners healthy meals each day, We saw learners returning in their numbers with almost a 100% attendance rate on the first day of the school term. Previously less than 30 kids would return to school. We also renovated the school kitchen area and partnered with the local community to prepare the meals for the kids. We hope to see an improvement in the learners’ performance at school through the feeding scheme as learners will no longer be learning on an empty stomach.
Our next plan for the school is to kick off a community garden at school that will supplement meals and provide agriculture education to the kids at the school.
Toilets at Mangwara school
We have completed the toilet project at Mangwara school and installed the first flushing toilets for the school. This is a milestone achievement as many learners have never used a flushing toilet or had a water source in the toilet. This will go a long way towards improving the students' sanitation, safety and hygiene at the school.
CECT Soccer tournament
The CECT soccer tournament hosted on the 28th of September is an annual sporting event hosted in the Chobe region in Botswana which brings together primary school learners from five villages in the area to participate in a fun-filled day of sports. The main objective of this event was to create a platform to inspire the youth in Botswana through sports and fitness. We had 90 learners from the Satau, Parakarungu, Kachikau, Kavimba and Mabele villages participating in the event.
There were over 200 spectators including parents, the local community, community leaders, and students from Kachikau Primary School and the disability unit at the school that ABCF supports. The local Chief came out to support the young soccer stars and took part in the prize-giving and medal handover to all the kids, coaches and the “man of the match” from each team. The event was a great success and the atmosphere during the matches was electrifying. We are overwhelmed by the community’s support and generous donors who went above and beyond to make this event a success.
We are extremely grateful for the ongoing support for our education projects.
Female guides
We are seven months into the first cohort of our female guides program and the guides are hard
at work in our camps in Botswana. They completed their theoretical training in December 2021 and
are currently on rotation in our Botswana camps focusing on their practical guide training. The
hard work, dedication and passion demonstrated by our guides so far is contributing to the
success of this program. We are currently recruiting 3 new guides who will join the program in July.
This is a great step forward towards our goal of employing and developing 25 female guides in
Botswana by 2025.
Khwai Preschool
ABCF, in partnership with the Khwai Private Reserve and the Naledi Foundation has been
supporting the pre-school in the local community. To date, we had fixed the fence at the school
and installed a new playground and jungle gym. Further improvements were done at the school
with upgrades concluding in May 2022. We repainted the building, installed a kitchen at the school,
installed burglar bars and supplied furniture and equipment to the school. The school was officially
handed over on the 14th of May 2022 and the director of the ministry of education from the North-
West district was present at the ceremony.
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