Educating 70+ children in Mathare Slum Kenya

Despite some civil unrest and objections to curfew lockdowns schooling has just about returned to normal. There are still restrictions and most people are aware of not gathering in large groups. Classes at St. Benedicts SoH were revising up to March March and have since taken there exams. We are currently awaiting the outcome of these exams and the opportunity to rank them against other SoH but the forecast is for these exams to be at least comparable with other SoH. Considering this is a new SoH and that much learning opeortunities were lost during the pandemic this would be a real result.As discussed in the last report online lessons delivered by volunteer experienced teachers here in the UK in the Sciences and Maths for at least 1 1/2 hrs each week, have restarted with the new cohort of students.Pupils are again responding well and expectations are high.ChallengeAid is ensuring that the is a good stock of past papers over the past 5 years with questions & marking scheme answers in those areas.Two interesting developments are that we have secured 2 new Supervisors to join the current team. These are pupils who have now left the SoH as pupils but want to give back as Supervisors. The second is that the teachers are attending the lessons devised for the pupils as they feel that they are gaining themselves from the experience.

As children can gather more freely together more time is being spent on our targeted sports such as cricket,volleyball, rugby and football. Before the pandemic ChallengeAid had won two national TV competitions for Informal Slum Settlement children winning the top two spots in two consecutive years. The competition was not held last year but there is a real expectation that that we can do well again this year with St. Benedecticts especially training twice a week at all ages and genders.

 The "new normality".has not been fully achieved as yet but it seems that the rhythym of life is starting to return to the environment.