Quality Education in Sierra Leone and Liberia

With the opening of two new schools in January 2016, total student enrolment in Rising Academy schools has risen from 83 students at the end of 2015 to 390 students today. All three Rising schools are majority female, with girls representing 56% of the total student body.

Thanks to the support of our generous donors, we have expanded our scholarship programme to ensure that more students from disadvantaged families are able to access the high quality education provided in these schools. 65 students are now receiving needs-based scholarships, or 17% of total enrollment. Of these, 42 are girls (65%).

Hawanatu, a JSS2 student at the new Rising Academy school in Tengbeh Town, is one of the students benefiting from the expanded program. “I really enjoy the way the teachers teach us because they teach us correctly and if anyone did not understand they will go over it again for us to understand better,” she says. “I like the way the learning is going on. I never attended this kind of school. I will wish to be here till S.S.S [senior secondary school] level.”

Assessing need is difficult when most employment is informal and accurate data on families’ financial circumstances are limited. However, we can get a picture of the economic and demographic backgrounds of the families the scholarship programme is supporting. These families typically have the following characteristics:

• Single wage earners: 4 out of every 5 (82%) scholarship students has only one parent earning
• Female caregivers: nearly two-thirds (63%) of scholarship students have a female primary wage earner/caregiver
• Low educational attainment: nearly half of all primary caregivers never went to school, or at most attended some amount of primary schooling, but cannot read
• Taken together, this means that nearly a third (29%) of scholarship students are children of single women who cannot read or write
• About half of scholarship students live in either homes made of zinc, mud bricks, or unfinished buildings.
• About two thirds of these families are trying to pay school fees for at least three children

Hawanatu’s situation is fairly typical. Her mother is a single parent supporting three children, of whom Hawanatu is the eldest. She understands the responsibility this entails. “In future, I want to become a banker and if my dream come true I, my family, and others will enjoy and get the benefit of me. And I will make sure that I will take my mother out of the suffering that she is going through right now just because of me. I am [her eldest child], that is why she is putting her focus more on me, for me to continue my education. And I promise that I will never let her down. I have one younger sister and one younger brother. That is why am trying all my level best for me to become a good person. So that I will support them all.”