Parents’ Saturday

On the 25^th of August NIHEP organized the event “Parents’ Saturday” for the families in “Children’s support” -project. The aim was to bring the community together by inviting the families, education stakeholders, teachers, ward officers and para-socialworkers to discuss about the importance of the education. The event was held at Sahwa school in Lwanhima and was inspired by the last year’s event for the parents of the girls in “Wasiliana” project.

The content of the day included introductions, speeches from the teachers and NIHEP officers and open discussion. In the discussion the participants talked about how to support the children how to go to school. The parents shared about their own situation and challenges they are facing and advised each other. The ward education officer encouraged the parents to co-operate with the teachers and ensure that the children are going to school. The academic teacher told the parents about the “Tusome” –project and the importance of the reading, writing and counting skills. 

In the end the participants were introduced an art exhibition which the children had made. All in all we were happy to see that there were approximately a hundred participants in total. We felt that the event was a success and the participants were active in taking part in the discussion. The event was a good start for the collaboration in the community between the education stakeholders and the parents. We would like to thank all the participants for their interest and The Global Social Work Finland for providing the refreshments of the event.

Tusome-project

NIHEP supports the most vulnerable children in Lwanhima ward. In 2018 NIHEP did home visits for families and noticed that there were many children who don’t know how to read, write and count, even though they are already at std. 3. NIHEP discussed about the situation with the teachers and they told about the challenges during previous years concerning the fact that the children are not allowed to recap a class even if they haven’t acquired the necessary skills. They also said that there can be over 200 students in one class which makes it very difficult to follow each student individually. In addition families are poor and some parents are illiterate so they can’t support their children. Some children don’t attend to school regularly because they are not encouraged to do so at home.

 

NIHEP started to plan with the teachers what could be done to help these 68 identified illiterate children. It was decided that three teachers will give extra lessons for the illiterate children every day during six months. NIHEP promised to get fund for the project if the teachers develop a plan on how to minimize the illiteracy problem in the future. NIHEP collected the money with the help of their Finnish interns Susanna Karasti, Elina Laine and Johanna Selin. The teachers came up with a plan to provide extra teaching in reading, writing and counting for those standard 1 and 2 students, who have not proceeded as expected. They also decided to add two more teachers to standard 1, so now there are three instead of one. 

The goal of the project is that all these illiterate children will learn the reading, writing and counting skills by the end of six months. NIHEP will co-operate with the teachers and the community during the project in order to improve the sustainability of the results. To get the parents involved into the program NIHEP organized an event called “Parents’ Saturday” for the families. By being able to read, write and count the children will have a chance to educate themselves and more possibilities in the future.