Wednesday, April 15, 2015

Schooling in Communities Living in Extreme Poverty

Community Builders and Anhart Foundation are working to strengthen sustainable growth in various sub-Saharan African. In many African countries, the law require that all children attend primary school. Due to extreme poverty levels and lack of government infrastructure, there are insufficient numbers of schools in many communities, and many of those that exist do not provide quality education. 
Below is a picture of one of the schools I visited in DRC Bukavu.  This school does not have desks, and the walls are falling apart.

For the majority of children live in extremely rural and impoverished areas, the hope of attending school is a distant dream, even to the most academically gifted children.  In addition to financial obstacles, children face major infrastructure obstacles to attending school regularly. A big part of every child’s day, usually the girls, is spent fetching water for the family and the school, where it is used for daily needs such as preparing food and watering the trees and plants. The boys mainly tend to the livestock. 

Sometimes the closest water source for a village is miles away, time spent fetching water is precious time not spent in school.  Due to this, CoBI, Anhart Foundation and Community builders are now paying school fees to the children living in extreme poverty in DRC. 
The picture below shows some of the school going children attending one of the sensitization meetings.​


In DRC the children who are not of school going age are very malnourished. The parents have to spend the day in the fields cultivating, while the children are left home without any food.  With the introduction on PiF and ENP, families are now able to improve their well being.