IREAD has broken ground on the first of seven Early Childhood Development Centres that will be built in 2019. Five ECD Centres will be built in Uganda (at Bukeda, Butende, Kasangati, Luzira, and Kanunga) and two in Pakistan (at Raman and Shuist). These new ECD Centres will allow for an additional 2,400 ECD enrolments each year and will bring us to 22 ECD Centres in total by the end of 2019.
IREAD builds centres in remote villages where ECD is not already offered but where there are sufficient numbers of children aged 3 to 6 to warrant an ECD program. Our criteria also includes selecting a villages that are eager to form a volunteer Centre Management Committee (CMC).
CMCs are integral to IREAD successfully delivering ECD programs. In addition to attaining local building material (bricks, sand, dirt) to build the Centre and providing unskilled labour to help with construction, once the school is operational the CMC moves into a management role. Members of the CMC act as our ambassadors, encouraging the village’s parents to enrol their children. The CMC sets and collects the school fees (which in Uganda typically ranges from $8 to $11). It is not uncommon, however, for fees to be lowered or waived for parents who cannot pay. About 97% of our parents are subsistence farmers and the household’s income can be heavily impacted by drought and low market prices.
The CMC uses the school fees to pay for:
We are very grateful for your support and encouragement. Your gifts are helping with the construction of one of the five new schools in Uganda (we have received pledges for the four other Uganda schools and the two Pakistan schools), and will help us to support the CMCs that do not collect the school fees they need to ensure they can provide the best possible ECD environment for the village's children.
Thank you.
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