New benches for the community school

Visiting the community school in Kulaa, you can see that some classrooms look quite desolate. Children sit on the floor or squeeze into a bench of two or three. The teachers are overburden, the classrooms look uncomfortable and do not exactly promote learning or motivation.

Since we decided to  support the community school this year and to see how more of the small children can be enrolled in school, we started a campaign and provided the necessary benches. At the same time, the classrooms were repainted by a group of parents and are now ready for the start of the new school year.

 

A statistic of the Ghana Educational Service from 2006 shows that about 20% of all school aged children are either not enrolled or unable to attend school after just a few years. A small survey in Kulaa has shown that about 60 children per year are not enrolled in school. No or irregular school attendance has its consequences. Research  has shown that about 50% of Ghanaian school children do not have sufficient reading and writing skills.

The embellishment of the school with the involvement of some parents alone is not enough. When the school year starts, Walisu has to find out which children have not (yet) been enrolled. Whether we will then succeed in convincing the parents to send their children to school remains to be seen. Lack of money will not be the cause, because the primary school in the community is free and the little children don’t have to wear school uniforms either. Additionally, school feeding has been implemented nationwide in Ghana for several years, i.e. the lunch for the school children, also works in Kulaa.