Quality Education in Sierra Leone and Liberia

“I stay with my mother. She is a trader selling rice,” explains Umu, a student concluding the second year of her studies at Rising Academy Waterloo, in Western Freetown. “We wake at 4am early in the morning. When I get to the market, I help her to cook. After that, I get ready for school and after school, I go to the market again to help her sell. We get home around 8 or 9pm.”

Thanks to the support of Solon Foundation donors, Umu is one of 260 students—18% of total enrollment—that received need-based scholarships to attend a Rising Academy school in Sierra Leone this academic year. The majority of scholarship recipients (63%) are girls.

The story of Umu, who lives in a single parent home with three other sisters, is typical of the communities which Rising Academies serves. About 53% of scholarship students are from households with only one wage earner. Given the low level of educational attainment among caregivers—40% have never attended school—informal economic activities such as petty trade and stone mining are the main sources of income, which typically does not suffice to support their family let alone their children’s education. As a result, many students are at risk of having to join their parents or caregivers in their trade, potentially at the expense of their own education. Many insist that they would have dropped out of school were it not for the scholarship.

Umu says her favorite subjects are Mathematics and Science, and she has a dream for the future: “my plan is to become a medical doctor. I will be a doctor for people to get well. I want to help my mother not to suffer the way that she is right now, and I want to help my sisters for them to have education like me.” When asked about her experience at the Rising Academy school, she notes, “[the teachers] encourage us to learn. Even if we are wrong they still thank you [for participating]. They create a good learning environment, and treat us all equally.”

For Umu, however, the scholarship means a lot more than just access to a unique learning experience. “I have 3 sisters,” she tells me. “All of them got married at the age of 11 or 12 because they weren’t performing in school. If I am educated, I will be someone in the future. When a girl is educated, you have educated the world. Without education, I would have been married a long time ago.”

She’s grateful for that opportunity, and sees it as an incentive to strive for academic excellence. “Because of the scholarship, I come to school everyday, punctual and never absent,” Umu says. “I didn’t put my attention somewhere else; I put it only in education.”