Build a community school to educate 150 children

We are excited to share that our partners are making great progress in constructing our fourth community learning center. They anticipate installing a roof on the building next week.

This will be the first school in this rural village. We will begin with a kindergarten class and then add additional classrooms and students over time. Each child will receive a daily lunch to improve nutrition. This is especially important as a regional drought has significantly reduced harvests and food insecurity is expected. 

Our partners are consulting with traditional leaders and families to select the students to join the first class. The staff meets with parents and discusses their goals for their children. A graduate of our vocational training program is also working on constructing student desks and bookshelves.

We look forward to sharing the opening of the new school in our next update.

Our trip to Ghana earlier this year was very successful and we were grateful for the opportunity to meet the community leaders and some of the children in Duahi. We hope to begin construction of their first school in September. Unfortunately, this community has never had access to education and adults have a zero percent literacy rate. Despite this challenge they are very eager to create opportunities for their children.

The traditional leaders of the village donated a large, beautiful piece of land to our local partners (CRI) for the school (see photo). The village name, Duahi, means grove of DawaDawa trees - a native tree used for medicine and food flavoring. We are excited to have enough land to both build a school and to engage our students in planting trees and a school garden. 

The first year the Duahi school will have 25 kindergartners and will add a new class each year. Students like Mariam, pictured here, are very excited to be able to go to school!