Help us create 120 school seats for rural children

Dear friends,

 At the outset, we would like to reiterate our heartfelt gratitude for your continuous support in various ways, be it direct donations or spreading the word about our causes. We are truly honored that you have selected our projects among thousands of amazing projects from around the world. In response, to live up to your expectations,  we have been doing our best to ensure targeted use of every hard-earned cent you are generously gifting to our communities in need by ensuring effectiveness, efficiency and transparency,.

At this point, we have no ongoing project on education; however, we do have plans to implement several projects on improving the conditions in rural schools of Tajikistan by creating/improving sports and dining facilities based on the request we received from communities in our area of operation. Thus, we are in process of mobilizing funds to start the process soon.

Meanwhile, we are very delighted to share some exciting news. We had two important visits to our facilities, specifically School No 51 in Ghazantarak Village of Tajikisan, where we created 70 additional seats through the construction of two additional classrooms thanks to your generosity.

On October 24, 2021, a consultant of Terre des hommes (tdh) Germany visited the School No 51 to become familiar with the results of our activities and highly appreciated the work we have done there. We recently started cooperation with the tdh Germany through a pilot project on access to quality healthcare in the Devashtich District of Tajikistan.

It was a great honor and pleasure to have Dr. Andreas Prothmann, Ambassador Plenipotentiary and Extraordinary of the Federal Republic of Germany to the Republic of Tajikistan, on a visit to the Devashtich District. Ambassador Prothmann also visited School No 51 among other facilities and highly praised the quality of construction and finishing activities. The German Embassy in Dushanbe provided a grant amounting to EURO 2470 for the completion of the construction of the two classrooms we accomplished in this School No 51.

Please enjoy some pictures attached to this report from the above two visits. We also added links to the video of the Handover Ceremony of the Project on Construction of two Additional Classrooms in School No 51 in Ghazantarak Village of Tajikistan and our interview, with The Middle Road, about our current activities and future plans. We hope you will like it. 

We once again thank each and every of you for your kind generosity and for selecting our initiatives. We would not have been able to do so many things without your support.

We look forward to continued cooperation with all of you and bringing more happiness to ordinary and underprivileged people in rural areas with your generosity and comprehensive support.

Links:

• Handover Ceremony, Project on Construction of Two Classrooms
• Our Interview, with The Middle Road, on our current and future

Education is vital for upholding all human rights and freedoms, ensuring adequate living standards of the vulnerable groups, namely children. This project has significantly improved access to quality education of almost 600 children in Ghazantarak village of Tajikistan’s remote Devashtich district. It helped create 64 additional seats through completing a construction and equipment of the two additional classrooms in the School No 51.

We are happy to update you on the most recent accomplishments and developments within this milestone initiative.

The project was initiated by the local community in Ghazantarak Village, which for years has faced a severe lack of seats in their secondary school No 51. The existing building had capacity for 360 students while in fact it had to accommodate around 554. This situation has only been exacerbated by the ongoing pandemic and continued negatively affecting the quality of education. The classrooms were overcrowded and the teachers were not able to reach all students with their respective curricula in an effective manner.

With this in mind, in July 2020, the local community, guided by the local executive authorities of Devashtich District kick-started the construction of two additional classrooms with their own in-cash and in-kind contribution. Unfortunately, due to the COVID-19 pandemic the community’s economic situation has worsened as the majority of local people are dependent on migrant remittances incoming from Russia mainly and other countries of the region. The 30,000 Tajik Somoni (equivalent to almost USD 3,000) of cash sufficed only to lay the foundation and erect the walls of the two classrooms and so the construction activities had to be put on hold. At this point, Mr Umarkhon Otakhonov, Head of the Local Neighborhood (the smallest unit of administration in the national system) approached our NGO with a request to help them with fundraising to complete the project. Given the dire need and high level of enthusiasm of the local community in advancing education, we have started the fundraising process by launching a campaign via GlobalGiving, as well as by reaching out to a broader donor community.

To ensure a transparent process for management of incoming donations, we created a project transparency committee, comprised of representatives from the local community, parents’ committee, school administration and the Head of the local neighborhood. The committee was engaged in the process of procurement of construction materials and responsible for quality supervision of the construction process.

Thanks to ensuring full transparency of the process, we mobilized TJS 143,000 (almost USD 13,000) from different sources, including USD 3,128 from our individual donors through GlobalGiving, USD 2000 from the Peshraft Charity in Tajikistan, USD 500 from Davronjon Okhunjonov and his friends, USD 500 from Shavkat Mamadjonov, USD 2960 from the German Embassy in Dushanbe, USD 1500 from Zeppelin Tajikistan, USD 400 from the Northern High School of Forest Hills Public School in Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA, USD 1500 from the Devashtich District Local Executive Authorities, and USD 3000 (both in-cash and in-kind) from the local community. One of the most encouraging cases is that of Laura Teodore, a student from the Northern High School in the USA. She has approached our NGO herself, and based on our interview she has won the donations competition in her class and channeled the prize amount to our project.

Like in any project, we faced some challenges in the implementation phase as well. Prior to our engagement the School Administration and the Local Neighborhood Authorities assured us that they would ensure free labor contribution by the local community members and we would need to provide construction materials only. However, the quality supervision revealed that the community members, who agreed to install the roof boards free of charge, did their job with a poor quality. Our NGO reacted to this case immediately and after a series of discussions and negotiations with the school administration and local authorities, we reached an agreement on hiring qualified paid laborers to implement construction activities. Thus, the NGO Sadoqat has hired a qualified construction team leader, who was mandated to ensure quality construction by finding local qualitied builders and we were happy with his performance. Another challenge we faced in implementation of the project, was the weather conditions. While we launched the fundraising campaign, mobilized some donations and started the construction activities, winter arrived, and the unfavorable weather conditions (cold weather, snowfall) caused challenges in speedy implementation of construction works. We had to wait for months until the interior plastering would get dry to perform finishing activities. As a result, the project completed, and the classrooms were actually commissioned in March 2021. The official launch ceremony took place on April 27, 2021 with participation of representatives from the German Embassy in Dushanbe, Devashtich District Local Executive Authorities, Devashtich District Education Department, School No 51 Staff, local communities and students.

All in all, we used the mobilized funds to install roof boards, plastic windows and doors, as well as floor board, conducting finishing activities and equip the classrooms with 64 chair sets, two table and chair sets for teachers, electronic board, projector, a laptop and training aids. As a result, the project created 64 additional seats and thereby significantly improved access of the local children to quality education.

Additionally, Zira Media, a local media production company, has agreed to shoot a short video about the project for free in recognition of our efforts, which is published in our social media pages and here on the project page on GlobalGiving.

Finally, we would like to recognize the invaluable contribution of our true friends, particularly Rayyan Merchant from USA, who made both financial contribution as our recurrent donor (though he is a student himself), provided a great support in creating the website of our NGO at www.sadoqat.weebly.com, as well as helped promoting our project and our Organization, to help us mobilize more funds. Last but not least, we sincerely thank all of our distinguished donors from around the globe, who were with us in this process, having supported us both financially and through other means, including spreading the word about our initiative and re-sharing our posts and publications with their contacts and social media channels. We would not be able to accomplish this noble mission without your support.                                                                                                                            

Dear friends, 

Dear supporters,

We are very thrilled to share exciting news with you. Thanks to your generous support we have been able to complete the construction and refurbishment of the two additional classrooms in Ghazantarak Village of Tajikistan. The classrooms are fully ready to accept students. We would like to take this opportunity to offer our heartfelt gratitude to each of you for your unprecedented generosity during such a difficult period of the COVID-19 pandemic. We do understand how it is difficult for each of us these days and how humanity has been severely suffering from this challenge. You did a heroic deed by sharing our challenges and offering your hand of help. 

We would like to inform you that the German Embassy also supported us in this process and their representatives are going to visit the school at the end of April to see the results of our activities. We are also expecting the visit of the German Ambassador to Tajikistan to our region when we would like to organize a grand ceremony with the participation of other donors and supporters. We will share pictures and other evidence of these events once they have taken place. 

You can find some pictures of the finished classrooms. All financial documents will be shared with you once we fully finalize the process as we have not withdrawn the recently received funding to pay the salary of some workmen hired for this project. 

Once again, on behalf of our Team, the School Administration, the residents of Ghazantarak Village, and the Local Authorities of Devashtich District, we would like to extend our wholehearted gratitude to everyone and each of you for your time, for your generosity, for being with us in this uneasy time, and for gifting a very precious present to our children - ACCESS to EDUCATION. 

We do hope to see you among our friends and supporters within our future projects and initiatives to enable underprivileged people in rural areas to exercise their fundamental rights to education, health, and other important areas. 

Sincerely,

Muhiddin

Distinguished Friends and Supporters,

We are pleased to update you on our recent progress made by our project.

Thanks to your support both in the form of personal donations and promotion of our idea among your contacts we were able to mobile USD 300 on the day of GlobalGiving GivingTuesday Campaign and deserve USD 90 as an incentive matching. Overall, we managed to mobilize USD 1306 of USD 2300 target through the GlobalGiving. Thus, we are on half a way in our journey and look forward to reaching its finish point soon.

We received the second disbursement of EURO 770 within the total amount of EURO 2470 from the German Embassy on December 3, 2020. This amount will be used to finalize the construction activities. Relevant report on spending will be shared accordingly. 

We have three recurrent donors now, to whom we are extremely grateful for selecting our project to support continuously.

Mr Shavkat Mamadjanov donated TJS 5700 (equivalent to USD 500) and Ms Muattara Bashirova made contribution of TJS 500 (about USD 45) in cash. Based on their consent, their donation will be used to pay the labor of workmen engaged in the classrooms' construction.

Based on our application to Aga Khan Foundation in Tajikistan (AKF) the First Microfinance Bank of Tajikistan as a part of the Aga Khan family institutions committed to allocate TJS 2000 (about USD 175) given their more efforts in support of COVID-19 response activities. 

Lesson Learned: Initially our agreement with the Local Council was that they would ensure workmen's labor as an in-kind contribution from the local community. However, later we noticed low quality of performance by the workmen providing free services and decided to hire paid laborers with better qualifications to ensure quality and wise use of resources generously donated and trusted by all of you, our dear donors. Thus, we have some contingency expenditures, which will be covered through the above-mentioned cash donations. Relevant reports will be shared with you accordingly.

Challenge: One of our challenges is that due to electricity rationing in rural areas the village does not have electricity during the daytime mainly and we have to use power generators to facilitate the work of our workmen, which has been causing some additional expenditures and inconveniences. However, we are committed to make all efforts we can to finalize this project successfully and in a high quality to prove that you made a right decision.

The construction is going on progressively. Now we finished laying concrete and are in the process of boarding joist mantling to install floor later. You can find pictures on the progress attached to this report. 

Now we are available not only on the facebook, but also on Twitter (https://twitter.com/NSadoqat) and Youtube (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpZdql9B7gU0J9vkaJXvyHA?view_as=subscriber). Please follow us on these platforms to be updated on our progress.

Last but not least, we are just at the start of our journey in crowdfunding and we believe we still have a lot to learn. We are convinced that each of you have your unique experiences, cases and ideas to share. We would love to hear your stories and priviliged to avail your advice/recommendations on how to further improve our activities to remain your trusted beneficiary/partner and to prove the wise use of precious donations made by each of you. 

We would be pleased to answer any question you might have with regard to our project.

We would highly appreciate your further support to our project by reposting/resharing our initiative in your pages on various social media you use.

Once again, please accept our heartfelt gratitude for your time and support.

Gratefully,

PO Sadoqat Team.

Links:

• PO Sadoqat Youtube Page

We are thrilled to share with our generous donors some good news about our project.

The most encouraging news we would like to share with you is that we are honored to have our first recurrent donors Skyler Hogue in our short history of crowdfunding efforts. We would like to take this opportunity to offer our heartfelt gratitude to Mr Hogue for his generocity and choosing our project among so many great initiatives in this platform to continuously support. We hope to see more generous people from around the world among our recurrent donors.

The German Embassy in Dushanbe kindly supported us with EUR 2470 through its Small Grants Programs to to enable us to complete the construction works in the two classrooms. We received the first disbursement at the amount of 20,842 TJS (70 % of the total funding) on November 10, 2020. This amount was used to buy some flooring board, boarding joist and other materials for the floor and ceiling as well as some paint for the floor and walls. More information and evidences about the construction process will be published soon.

Thanks to our efforts we were acknowledged by the GlobalGiving community and ranked as an effective and top-ranked nonprofit. We are also pleasedd to have improved our search rank. 

We look forward to being able to take advantage of GivingTuesday 2020 and continue doing something for our community to enable needy children in rural areas to get access to quality education.

We would like to take this opportunity to once again offer our heartfelt appreciations to our generous donors and supporters from around the world. The Godd bless you all!