The Guernsey funded project saw some of its first fruit come into season last month when at least 100 children between the ages of 3 – 10 walked through the doors of the new school building to begin the new school term. Long-serving teacher of the pre-existing nursery school, Ms. Jacqueline Nakyeyune (also popularly called “aunt Jackie” by her class) was on hand to receive them. Read more about Jacqueline’s inspirational strory here (pdf file). U.K. project partner, Advantage Africa together with SPAU began to implement this project in late 2006 with the construction first, of a 6-classroom block and then later an office block and then sanitary facilities. The aim of this project was to support the local community of mostly single parents in Bajjo-Bombo to provide a pre-primary and primary school education to a target 300 vulnerable children so as to enable them achieve their potential. Many of these children have had to contend with walking up to 10 miles each day to and from the nearest government-supported school to receive an education, in addition to helping their parents/guardians at home with the household chores each morning before they go to school and afternoon/evening when they return. This is particularly hard for the youngest children. The new school in their community will now enable these children and others like them in the nearest communities to channel more time and energy into their school work and also more productive activities at home as a result of attending a much nearer school to home.
Currently at the Bajjo-Bombo community school:
- Ongoing nursery/pre-primary school classes and primary classes from p.1 – p.3.
- A new school management committee has been elected to steer the development of the school.
- Three new teachers have been appointed to serve with Jacqueline, at the new school.
According to Mr. Zack Lwanga, SPAU monitoring and evaluation coordinator, the bigger challenge for the community school now is meeting the strict requirements set by the district education council “in the shortest time possible” for the school to be short-listed for government support . “Because,” Zack argues, “it is certainly not feasible that we (the charity) shall be able to support the school operations now for longer than a year, as that would firstly impose on us quite heavily financially, but it would also be a shift from our core work of supporting poor communities to empower themselves. In addition, it is also the responsibility of the government to educate its citizens, so in our bid to achieving school sustainability, we shall certainly not tire of reminding the government in this case of the need to fulfil its role, where incidentally half of the work has already been cut out for it.” To achieve the same end, the SPAU team have already been to see the Luwero L.C.V Chairman, Mr. Ronald Ndaula, on at least 3 separate occassions and the district education council over the same matter of ensuring that the school becomes government aided within the near future.
The school has begun. And in the first parents’ meeting at the school, the same parents agreed to contribute a small fee per child towards the sustenance of the school for the time being. However, most of the parents are also very poor and as a result less than 20% have so far managed to meet the full fee determined five weeks into the school term. So once again, the school faces the challenges of poor teacher facilitation (i.e. by way of teaching materials, school stationery, etc…) to carry out their roles effectively. This does not deter more children from joining the school however, as at the time of writing this, Jacqueline had just communicated to Paul (SPAU Director) on phone that they had registered their 144th new entrant that morning and so some of the children are having to sit on papyrus mats in their new classroom because they cannot all fit on the few available desks. Although most of these children are looked after by single parents, the new school is open to everyone and therefore shall benefit children from all families in the same area and its surroundings.