Position South African girls for Success in iSTEAM

On the 6th of July 2020, we reopened schools after a South African national lockdown that lasted more than 3 months.  In this period, Molo Mhlaba operated a Whatsapp homeschooling groups ensuring that while the physical school was closed, the doors to learning remained open to the 120 girls enrolled at our school.

Moreover, we supported our 120 families with emergency COVID-19 humanitarian relief in the form of food parcels, hygiene products, airtime and data bundles, and homeschool materials. Between April and June we have had the following impact:

• 170 food vouchers delivered to families in our school community to ensure that they could alleviate hunger in their homes,
• 305 food parcels delivered to our families,
• 240 hygiene products (containing sanitizers, face masks, face cloths, soap, tooth brush and tooth paste, tissues, toilet paper and pamphlets with COVID-19 safety educational materials) delivered to our families
• 240 homeschool materials with LEGOs, play dough, books, art and craft materials and stationery was delivered to our girls.

As a school that provides two nutritious meals a day to the girls, we added this component to our model as a response to the real challenges children face with every day hunger at school. During the lockdown, it was critical that we provided much needed food relief during this time that had rendered many of our parents unemployed or were prohibited from earning a living from the formal and informal economy in South Africa.

Your continued support ensured that we could speedily respond to the food security threats faced by our girls and their families and continued to support their learning whilst at home.

We are now back at school and the South African economy continues to open up at a slow pace meaning that many of our families remain in desperate economic situations.

We have a target to provide an additional 120 food parcels, 120 homeschool materials and hygiene products to the girls for September 2020 valued at R70 000 ($4600).

Thank you for your continued support and we urge you to give what little you can towards our September goal.

We'd like to thank all of our supporters for their continued support of our school and its efforts to grow our model into a high impact network of small independent STEAM schools for girls across South African townships. Molo Mhlaba operates an extended school starting at 7:30am to 4pm, we provide students with two hot meals a day, we teach in isiXhosa and English, we expose students to robotics, computer programming and astronomy, and we build life skills and digital literacy.

In 2020, we have grown from offering STEAM focused curriculum to include yoga, ballet and contemporary dance. As we grow each year to reach, more girls, we are faced with the real need to grow from one campus to 10 schools by 2028. Operating a network of 10 Montessori PLUS STEAM primary schools for girls is our audacious goal as we move towards our VISION2028 to reach 2000 girls with safe, affordable, quality education in their communities.

The first quarter of the year kicked off strong with 108 girls enrolled at Molo Mhlaba School. Girls went on educational outings to the South African Astronomical Observatory to learn about astronomy and the advances that South Africa is making in the field. The second outing was to the Two Oceans Aquarium in Cape Town to learn about marine life. The South African school calendar was impacted by the Corona viris and schools closed 2 days earleri and have been closed for the month of April 2020 with uncertainty as to when we will reopen. 

Your continued support enables us to offer an enriched curriculum to our girls.

Now, more than ever, your support will ensure that we are able to provide food parcels to our families, deliver hygiene packs to all the households we work with and enable us to curate educational materials delivered to the girls in their homes so that learning can continue during lockdown.