Quality Education in Sierra Leone and Liberia

Part of being a new organisation is making mistakes and learning from them. This is a story about a mistake we made about shoes for our scholarship students. Footwear might seem an unlikely source of mistakes, but then again one of the other things about being a new organisation is that you don’t always know what’s going to cause you problems.

Here’s what happened. Students at Rising Academy Network schools pay a single inclusive fee that covers everything from tuition to learning materials to uniform. But the uniform doesn’t include footwear: it is up to individual students to decide what to put on their feet, and RAN doesn’t mind too much as long as students are in school and learning. When it came to designing our Scholarship Programme for students to attend a Rising school, we at the Solon Foundation applied the same logic: scholarships would cover nearly everything, but they wouldn’t include footwear. Because neither we nor the schools cared too much what type of shoes the students wore, we thought, the students (and their families) wouldn’t either. Turns out, we were wrong.

The first clue was when we awarded a scholarship to a student named Bonkie. Her family seemed so grateful, and yet for the first couple of days, Bonkie did not come to school. She only turned up at the start of the following week. We were confused. It was only later that we found out she and her family didn’t want her to go to school until she had the appropriate footwear, and so her father had cobbled together some money and gone all the way into town to buy her a pair of smart shoes.

Was it a mistake to think shoes don’t matter? Yes, and that’s something we will correct about our scholarship awards in future. But the bigger mistake was to think that we could know what mattered without listening to the students and families we support. That’s the real lesson we’ll try to remember in future.

Sometimes, though, even mistakes can produce pretty wonderful things. As we’ve explained before, students at Rising are taught the importance of our values, the 4Hs of ‘happy, hardworking, honest and helpful.’ In morning assemblies they remind each other that ‘We Are Rising’ and that ‘we work together, learn together, and succeed together.’

But there is a difference between saying the words and really meaning them. A few weeks ago, another scholarship student, Abass, learned just how much Rising students mean them.

Abass’s circumstances are even more difficult than Bonkie’s. His family set-up is unstable, and in a given week he will often stay under several different roofs. There is simply no way he would be attending a school like Rising without the support of our scholarship donors. As with Bonkie, however, Abass’s scholarship did not include footwear. Imagine his surprise then, when the students in his class – themselves far from well-off – decided to chip in to buy him a new pair of smart school shoes. Talk about putting your values into action.

By the time you read this, school will be over for another year. Come the start of the new school year in September, we expect to expand our scholarship programme, with 4 times as many students – and 8 times as many shoes. We simply couldn’t do it without your support, so thank you.