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.

Water tanks fixing project at Sahwa primary school in Lwanhima ward

Ni Hekima Pekee’s program “Children’s support” has been implemented since 2010.  The aim of this program is to support vulnerable children by providing them school equipment, health support and children’s right protection. We want to make sure that those children are helped, get capacity to access social infrastructure and are part of the society.

During the follow-up of the Sahwa primary school students who we support, we noticed that the school water tanks were broken. More than 1650 students and 32 teachers were at risk because they didn’t have any access to water at all. The head teacher told that they didn’t have any fund to fix the tanks and they had been broken for ten years. We and our intern Anni Pihlaja decided to start fundraising from different children’s and nutrition stakeholders around the world, and after a few days we had collected enough money to fix one big water tank. Now the students and teachers can wash their hands and drink during school hours.

At the moment we are fixing the nursery’s water tank with the fund we got from the Friends of Kenya and Asegelile Investment Limited. We are staying in contact with the stakeholders for more contribution in order to fix the rest of the tanks. Along the project we realized that a fence should be built to protect the water tanks and the school area overall. As a solution we met with the school head teacher and the chairman of the school committee and we agreed that they will build a local fence around the school yard to increase the safety. A fence was built with the help of Mwembe Africa around the nursery and we are continuing fundraising to get a fence around the rest of the school area.

Success story of Liza

"Liza" is a 17-year-old girl living with her family in Nyamagana district in the region of Mwanza. She lives with her mother and four siblings. Three of her older siblings are married and live with their families. Her father ran away from the family when Liza was twelve years old and now he has remarried in another village. The economic situation of the family is poor because the only provider is the mother and she has health issues. Other relatives are not able to support the family.

Liza goes to form one in secondary school and she wants to become a teacher in the future. Liza has been attending Ni Hekima Pekee’s “Wasiliana” project for girls support group since January 2017. In the middle of April 2018 Liza told our workers that she is not going to school anymore. This was because her mother couldn’t afford transport from home to school after the changes of the daladala routes. Now she had to take two daladalas instead of one on the single way.

NIHEP started the follow-up on the same day that Liza told about the situation. We visited the family and decided to support the transport and the missing school materials for Liza so she could go to school next week. After the weekend our field officer visited the family again and found out that Liza still didn’t go to school. She was afraid not finding her name in the student registration since she hadn’t gone to school for the past three months. Also, she hadn’t told the teacher the reason for not coming. The next day we discussed about the situation with Liza and the family and Liza agreed to go to school. We decided to escort her to school because the head teacher was frustrated with the situation. After meeting the head teacher we all agreed that Liza continues going to school.

On May we met the street chairman and he promised to provide some help with the transport occasionally. At the moment Liza is going to school and we continue with the follow-ups.

Children support in Lwanhima ward

The education support program has been implemented in Lwanhima since 2016 and is still going on. In this program Ni Hekima Pekee and the Ward Executive Officer with the support of SKKB Netherland have given full school equipment (school uniforms, exercise books, pens, rulers, rubbers and bags) to the most vulnerable children. This year there were 40 children in total; 16 boys and 24 girls between the ages 6 to 13. They were from 30 poor-low income earning households in Sahwa and Buhongwa schools.

Table 1. Gender and grade of the children who received the education support

Grade	Female	Male	In total
1	4	1	5
2	11	9	20
3	3	3	6
4	2	1	3
5	2	1	3
6	2	1	3

Unfortunately some of the identified most vulnerable children were left out from education support because of the limited fund of the organization. The organization aims to extend on helping more vulnerable children in education in the future.

Do YOU want to work with us?

NIHEP is looking for two Field Officers and one Monitoring&Evaluation Officer to join our team. If you have will to help and work with people, who are living in vulnerable conditions, send us an application letter. We will offer you the interesting working environment and the possibility to be a part of organization's development.

Check the job advertisement HERE and share the post, if you know people, who might be interested in.

The International Day of the Girl Child

For the honor of the Wednesday's special day, we can announce that the total number of the girls in our Wasiliana-group has already grown over 60! This means, that now over 60 girls have an opportunity to speak out loud and to learn how to communicate and protect their rights. They also have a safe space to share their ideas and worries with others.

We had the great number of girls participating on Wednesday.

On Wednesday 11th of October, we celebrated the International Day of the Girl Child with Wasiliana-group, two mothers of the girls, and with two special guests. Last Saturday, the girls had wished to discuss about women's leader opportunities on this special day, so we arranged two ladys to come and share with us about the current literature project they are helping with about Women leaders of Africa.

In the beginning of the session, we discussed together about leadership in society and at home. The girls were very familiar with current leaders, both male and female, in Tanzania and in Mwanza's society. The discussion also leaded us to share some things about gender roles at home. Most of the girls described quite stereotypical gender roles between family members, but we were delighted that two girls also shared a little bit different models of how their household duties have been shared between father, mother and children.

After the introduction of the topic and our guests,  we were shared with two stories of the Woman leader's in Africa. Our guests told us about Liberian peace activist Leymah Roberta Gbowee, who, together with Liberian women's peace movement, helped bring an end to the Second Civil War in Liberia in 2003. Also, they told us about Queen Nanny of the Maroon, political leader of Jamaica, originally born in Ghana, who's action contributed the escape of almost 1000 slaves over her lifetime in Jamaica.

In the end of the session!

The girls had focused well on the topic through whole session, and participated actively with sharing their thoughts and questions. They were also excited about our guests and the topic, and there were as many as 35 girls participating our session today. It was great to see, how bravely the girls nowadays introduce themself and talk in front of everyone, when in the beginning of the year, when the group started its activities, they were barely able to speak out loud. We really admire the courage of our clever, sweet and caring girls!

Anni Pihlaja

The writer is Master’s degree social work student from University of Tampere in Finland and is currently doing her internship with Ni Hekima Pekee.