Maunga Primary School
The Maunga primary school is the only primary school in Maunga village and currently accommodates 177 learners from ECE to grade 7. The school has three teachers including the principal. To date, we have painted the nursery classroom and the ablution blocks, provided learning materials and textbooks, installed solar power and burglar bars for the computer lab, and fixed all the windows at the school.
ABout our project
The school has a high absenteeism rate and the current pass rate the school is 22%. This is due to:
- Learners that are coming to school hungry; many are travelling long distances to school by foot and are learning on an empty stomach.
- The school is understaffed, they currently have three teachers, so the teachers and the principal are teaching more than one grade a day.
- Some learners drop out of school to go to work or are married off; child marriages are on the rise in Zambia due to factors such as poverty and teenage pregnancies.
- Learners have no educational support at home; parents are not educated and are therefore not able to assist learners with schoolwork and homework. Teachers are currently volunteering their free time to set up literacy classes for adults in the community.
Our long-term goal for the school and the impact we want to have:
We aim to address the challenges identified at Maunga primary school in three phases over the next few months:
Phase 1: Infrastructure improvements to the school which include making much-needed improvements to the classroom blocks, building additional ablution blocks, and providing learning materials and resources to learners at the school.
Phase 2: Addressing the nutrition challenges faced by learners through various feeding initiatives and agriculture programs at the school.
Phase 3: Increasing the teaching resources and support for learners at the school.
Impact measurement and tracking
- Teachers, learners, and infrastructure
- Change/improvements in teacher morale (are teachers happy, are they staying, are they motivated)
- Teacher performance and retention at the school (number of teachers joining and leaving, quality of teaching, training, development, and growth)
- Improvements made to school and accommodation (borehole, solar, classrooms, accommodation, garden etc.)
- Learner performance (increase pass and progress rate, reduction in dropouts)
- Feeding scheme (number of meals provided, improvement in school attendance and performance)
- Sustainability at the school (ownership of school resources, supplementation programs to generate economic activity at the school and how they are progressing etc.)
