By Helen Allen | Founder and Chair of Trustees, PEPAIDS
Since November, PEPAIDS’ Schools of Good Hope Project has been working with eight Zambian community schools, with the aim of significantly increasing the quality of education available to over 1000 of Zambia’s poorest and most marginalised children. Since our last update 3 months ago, all sorts has been happening!
Fit for Purpose!
Our fundraising has enabled more essentials to be fitted that have made the schools look, feel and function like schools! Simple things such as glass in the windows and locked grill gates on the doors mean that displays and other educational materials that we’ve provided can be left in the class rooms without fear of being stolen. Some schools have been enabled to have desks and chairs for the first time- a significant improvement from sitting on the floor where snakes, scorpions, and tarantulas frequently crawl!
New Loo!
Meanwhile, schools that previously had no sanitation facilities at all have started building brick toilet blocks and even introducing buckets of water for pupils to wash their hands, which is a huge progress in these rural areas.
Transforming words into Action!
Our teacher training programme continues to transform teaching standards from chalk and talk to interesting, interactive lessons. Pupils are engaging in experiments, bringing in nature samples for science lessons, and using a variety of materials for maths and literacy. Girls are included much more than they were previously and schools report that pupils are now enjoying lessons.
They heard it on the grapevine....
The huge strides forward that these schools have made in such a relatively short time has inspired confidence from the local community and attracted interest from far and wide. Word about our teacher training programme spread so rapidly that we have actually trained almost double the number we set out to! Thanks to our project, other local charities and NGOs have learnt about the schools and having seen the progress they are making, have directed their resources to help! As a result two schools are in the process of getting library facilities and two have had boreholes drilled so that they now have a clean, running water supply!
All this has been made possible thanks to your incredible support! Our schools of Good Hope are becoming exactly that! With better facilities and increased capacity, even more poor and vulnerable children are being enabled to access education to give them new hope and a future! Thank you!
Links:
Project reports on GlobalGiving are posted directly to globalgiving.org by Project Leaders as they are completed, generally every 3-4 months. To protect the integrity of these documents, GlobalGiving does not alter them; therefore you may find some language or formatting issues.
If you donate to this project or have donated to this project, you can receive an email when this project posts a report. You can also subscribe for reports without donating.
