By Lois Cochrane | Director of Operations
In the months between September 2021 - March 2022, School Club Zambia’s supporters raised an incredible £8,505 towards building a new library and e-learning centre for Siansowa Primary School! The majority of this funding was raised during our GlobalGiving campaign in September 2022, which following the financial crisis of the covid19 pandemic was a hard fundraising year for most UK charites.
We requested this funding to enable us to build and furnish this centre from start to finish. We are so proud to report that despite a few delays in the building process of the centre, it is now fully operational and already making a huge impact already on the lives of the children at the school.
Siansowa Primary School is located in the rural district of Sinazongwe, where School Club Zambia have been working to raise the quality and relevance of education since 2011. Despite being one of the oldest Government schools in our network (established in the 1980s), the level of qualitative education is exceptionally low. In the years between 2021 -2022, less than 10% of the children at the school were able to pass their end of primary examinations. The impact of this has been devastaTng for the children and their families who have paid large amounts of money on school fees. It has been unimaginably hard for these children to leave the school without any qualificaTons or be offered the option of repeating the year again.
The school has very few facilities and only 7 classrooms for the 10 grades and nursery group of over 700 children. One of these classrooms is currently being used as a temporary house for a teacher which has further exasperated the school’s lack of resources and space. In comparison, neighbouring Kariba South School, where we built a library and e-learning centre in 2015 has increased their pass rate to over 90% from 55% in 2014. The parents and teachers at this school have abributed much of their success to the library and e-learning centre, which is so much more than a space to read or learn IT skills!
Our original plan was to finish the library and e-learning centre in November but a longer rainy season than usual meant that we were unable to finish painting the centre untl the rains finished in March. The poor painting conditons was coupled with severe flooding, which also made the road between our office and the school impassable.
We are delighted to report that once the rains subsided we could continue with the building process and the centre is now fully in use, following an official handover in the first week of April. The handover which was organised in partnership with the teachers, children, parents and Ministry of Education, was a celebration of the effort put into the building by the whole community.
Siansowa Primary School’s struggle for qualitative education
We were thrilled to complete Siansowa Primary School ’s new library and e-learning centre with the help of people like you, as we know the building will be the turning point in the school’s ability to offer qualitative education. Whilst the long-term impact of the project will only be shown in January 2024, when the results of the grade 7 exams are published (children sit their end of primary examinations each November), there have already been some wonderful immediate benefits -
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