Literacy

St Stephen builds school

By Doreen Nawa
AS Zambia hurries to meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) targets, one of them is putting all children into primary school and at the same time reducing illiteracy levels in the country, all stakeholders ought to play their part to ensure that these targets become a reality.
The end of illiteracy is a choice, not a guess. There are a billion people on earth fighting daily for their rights to education.
The world has committed itself to ensuring that every country makes some progress in the education sector in the MDGs by 2015.
The ways out of the illiteracy trap can be found. The financial costs of the needed development aid are utterly manageable, especially if commitment and willpower from both the Government and stakeholders is shown.
In response to the many challenges that hamper education progress, there has been a rapid and spontaneous development of community schools in Zambia where children are educated outside the formal school system.
Recently St Stephens Anglican Church in Lusaka’s Garden Township constructed a community school at the cost of K125 million, which will cater for 350 children from grade one to grade seven.
Speaking at the official opening of the school, Ministry of Education’s Lusaka District education standard officer, John Shakafuswa, said the Government was committed to upholding the rights to education because education plays an important role in the well-being of human capital.
Mr Shakafuswa said the Government recognises community schools as an integral part to national development.
He said it will be impossible for the Government alone to achieve the eight targets listed on the MDGs.
The fight against extreme illiteracy cannot be won on rhetoric alone. The barriers to development in Africa are not only in the soils, but also in the mind.
Take a chance and educate an African, then the question of how will the barriers to development in Africa be addressed will be answered.
The biggest trap in developing Africa lies in the minds of Africans, try to empower their minds and see what goodwill come out of the so called ‘dark continent’.
And Bishop of Lusaka Anglican Diocese, David Njovu, says his church saw a need to contribute to education in the country after it observed the increasing numbers of orphans and vulnerable children in their area of existence.
While a variety of reasons, including HIV/AIDS, poverty, funding shortfalls and new curriculums are often cited as the cause for poor education results, education analysts cite the performance of teachers as the root cause for education’s melancholy.
Bishop Njovu says time to look down on community schools and associate them with substandard levels of education was long gone.
He says the notion was a late down to the attainment of the Government’s policy of education for all.
The clergy observed that without community schools, the attainment of the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) on education would be impossible.
The Bishop has since called on the teachers and the school authority to observe high standards of education.
Meanwhile, St Stephen Anglican Church priest in charge Father Frank Hakoola is well aware of the challenges in this community and while many others would have baulked at the idea of starting a school in a church and later constructing a school block within the premises, teachers were in short supply, and pupils conducted their lesson in one open space in the church, the man of God embraced it.
“When we started a school in the church many people never thought we would come this far. As I am speaking last year we had 19 pupils who sat for the Grade seven examinations and out of this number only two failed to make it to grade 8.
“Admittedly as a church, we had to do a lot of work to try and win these people (sponsors) over, as many were lagging behind, but once they saw that we were committed to this task they decided to support us,” says Fr Hakoola.
A few years back, this community school in Garden, one of Lusaka’s most populous urban residential area, was little different from the majority of the country’s schools, children from grade one to seven learning in one open space, in a church, with volunteer teachers and sitting on benches while others sat on the floor.
But in the last few years the St Stephen Community School has undergone a metamorphosis, with its pass rate surging to nearly 98 per cent last year, no mean achievement for a school still trying to shake off the legacy of unequal education system.
Not long ago, the difference between Government and community schools segregated school system ensured that schools for privileged children were provided with top facilities, while schools for underprivileged students are wretched and not funded at all.
But for St Stephen Community School the story of its start is different because Zambia National AIDS Network (ZANAN) Bank of Zambia (BOZ), Barclays Bank workers and the church realised their role to communities in which the exist and put resources together for the construction of this school.
After 17 years of democracy and huge spending by the Government to the education sector in the annual Budget every year, the immense challenge of reversing illiteracy remains a challenge if all is left in the hands of the Government.
Within this environment and against all the odds the community school has blossomed, not through the injection of huge amounts of money from the annual Government Budget for the education sector but through the sheer commitment and willpower of the stakeholders and the church.
It was not by chance that St Stephen community school renaissance coincide with the MDGs and the many challenges that the HIV/AIDS pandemic and poverty were posing on the lives of the vulnerable in society.
It is against this background that the St Stephen Anglican Church started the construction of this school over a year ago.
Fr Hakoola said their first course of action was to demonstrate their commitment to the task to both the community and sponsors alike, so they started the school inside the church.
The clergy disclosed that the major problem the school was facing was the shortage of teachers.
The school has only seven teachers meaning one teacher per grade and the teachers were volunteers who were not on a salary catering for 350 pupils daily.
The school’s success has solved the problem of illiteracy in Mandevu constituency, as it acts as a magnet because a lot of parents and guardians want to enroll their children at the school.
And Bank of Zambia (BOZ) deputy governor in charge of administration Tukiya Kankasa Mabula says education was cardinal in poverty reduction.
Dr Mabula said for Zambia to attain the education policy for all, there was need for churches and other cooperating partners to support the move.
She noted that the greatest gift that could be given to anyone was education adding that there could be no empowerment without education.
Community schools in Zambia were set up mostly in the absence of a nearby public school and in response to the inability of families to meet the costs associated with Government-provided schooling.