Promote Good Health Through Sports in South Africa

Hello Supporters!

If you follow some of our offer projects in South Africa you are probably aware that things are really tough right now! The number of staff to student ratio is too big and therefore schools have had to start to offer half day schooling to be able to teach all the children and even with this solution the class sizes average around 40-50 children per teacher. 

Naturally Sport is always the subject that gets dropped first, often because the schools do not have the resources and the teachers lack experience to teach a creative sports lesson, this comes down to lack of support. We know that poverty is a huge problem across Africa and rather than throwing money at all the things that come along with poverty by investing in education we can equip a nation to tackle poverty and grow their community and wider economy. 

But this is also a long term plan as we can't teach successful people in a day. While education remains so important I also see how Sports programs can really help increase learning. Providing sports to children we don't only stimulate their brain but we also keep them active, fit and healthy thus decreasing the number of sick days a child takes from school along with increasing their attention in class. Therefore sports is very important and while this project doesn't tackle the shortage of teachers, what we can do is ensure the limited time these children get in class is maximised. 

So what have we been up to? Funds have been a little low so not as much as we really want to do but our team have been visiting primary schools to provide lesson plans for sports to teachers. We know this doesn't have the biggest impact but it is the best we can do with the funding we have right now. Our longer term plan once we raise the funds is to run bi-annual roadshows where we go out into the community to run sports days to promote sport to the children and at the same time run training sessions for teachers, providing them with the skills to teach sport and at the same time we hope to leave a start equipment pack at each school we visit. It's a new initiative for 2023 and we need to raise around $4,000 to run a large successful outreach month. We are hopeful we will raise this over the next 3-6 months. 

Thank you for taking the time to read our update and we thank you for being a valued supporter!