Helping Rwandan Children out of Poverty

For the past three months, we have been working on our strategy for projects in Bugarama for the next three years. We are making an ambitious bid for funding from Jersey Overseas Aid who have been very generous in their support and encouragement for us to extend our horizons and to focus on the impact of what we want to achieve through our partnership with local schools there.

Our overall aim is to improve access for all to good quality educational opportunities. Our three primary objectives are to improve teaching and learning conditions, increase access to secondary, tertiary, and vocational training opportunities and improve the quality of teaching.

We are using the recommendations of the Impact Assessment study carried out last year as a guide and we have engaged David Musendo of Lifetime Consulting, who led that study, to help us establish a baseline study so that we can measure the outcomes of our projects at the end of the three years.

To this end, Dennis and I are traveling back to Bugarama at the end of April to participate in a workshop with our local partners to ensure their commitment to our strategic priorities.

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We believe that there are some exciting new initiatives in our strategy. Jersey Overseas Aid has recruited 10 volunteer teachers from Jersey who will spend time in Bugarama in August with teachers helping to improve English and share teaching techniques. This will be backed up by the Jersey Education Department which will establish an online training hub for local teachers. We’ll have news of these developments in our next report.

Another key area of our strategy will be to extend girls’ hygiene facilities to all local schools including a dedicated room with a bed, shower, toilet, sanitary products, and educational materials, with the aim of avoiding girls missing school during their periods.

All schools in Rwanda are now obliged to provide students with a cooked lunch. Our partner schools are developing agricultural initiatives to supplement the lunches. Two of the teachers from Muko School, Michel and Polyphile, have gained places for a 10-week course at Harper Adams Agricultural College in the UK to study the best farming methods.

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For the past couple of years, local teachers have helped us in our fundraising by running the Virtual London Marathon and this year is no different. Joel will be running for the second time with friends and Dennis and I are looking forward to being there this year to cheer him on. All donations to sponsor him will be welcome!

Mike and Dennis have been back in Bugarama for the first time since the pandemic reviewing our projects and planning our interventions for the next three years.

We had a tremendous reception at each of the supported schools, none more so than at GS St Paul Muko where a brass band and choir awaited to escort us around the town, followed by music, dancing groups and even contortionists, displaying the talents of the students.

This school has been transformed since our first visit 12 years ago and now leads the district in academic achievement, sports and innovation. Led by its dynamic headteacher, Father Emmanuel, the school has enthusiatically embraced the government call to schools to supplement the school lunches programme by farming to produce their own vegetables. All children are now fed at lunchtime each day and this reinforces school attendance and achievement.

Another initiative of the headteacher has been the programme to search out and find the many street children in Bugarama who have dropped out of school due to family conflicts, bereavement or sheer poverty. 150 children now attend each day, made to feel welcomed by fellow pupils as well as staff and receive two meals a day including weekends. Two teachers are permanently assigned to look after them and provide counselling. It comes as a significant cost to the school and is something we hope to include in our strategy to support schools over the next three years.

We have had discussions with headteachers and community leaders at nine local schools, including the two brand new schools which have been built recently by the Rwandan government and World Bank to address overcrowding. Several themes have emerged:

• One school, Bugarama Cite, the oldest school in the town, desperately needs new classrooms to replace very poor teaching and learning conditions.
• Vocational training is a high priority where many children leave school to be unemployed.
• Security fencing makes a big difference to protect schools from damage by outsiders and animals and also enables schools to keep students from absconding.
• Government policy insists that all schools must provide girls' hygiene rooms to support female school attendance but most facilities are inadequate.
• Schools have also seen the impact of the basketball/ volleyball courts we have been able to install in two schools.

The list of priorities is extensive and somehow we must whittle it down to a manageable programme which we can present to Jersey Overseas Aid, our principal funder. Our recent impact assessment study has demonstrated the effectiveness of our previous projects and we are confident of their ongoing support. We shall also try to diversify our sources of funding so that we can more adequately address the many issues we have heard about in the past few weeks which have shown us clearly the aspirations and drive of local people to reach ever higher standards in schools.