Halcrow Foundation has supported two projects run by Zambia Orphans Aid (ZOA) in Zambia which help vulnerable children at school. These include providing school desks and funding the creation of a small-scale fish farm.
Supporting lessons
Zambia has 1.2 million orphans and vulnerable children who live without the support or family structure they need to thrive. Many live in grandparent or child-headed households and get by on less than £1.50 a day. Without access to school, the children face a lifetime of poverty.
So Halcrow Foundation has funded new desks and benches at Twavwane Community School in Lusaka which is attended by more than 600 pupils. The school serves a community living in extreme poverty, where 90 per cent of adults are illiterate and many children are malnourished or living with HIV.
ZOA has been running a project that has already added two new classrooms to the school, and this has cut class sizes from 75 to 45 pupils. Halcrow Foundation contributed to the project by paying for 86 desks and benches, built by local craftspeople, which give pupils space to write and concentrate more easily. One of the pupils, Abram, aged 14, said, “Before we weren’t learning comfortably because there were a lot of pupils and not enough desks. Some had to sit on the floor. Now we have many desks and the classroom is big.”
Improving nutrition
We also supported a ZOA project to build a small-scale fish farm at a community school in Mazabuka District in Zambia. Two large fishponds have been stocked with 3,500 fish, and these are used to provide high-protein food for the 636 orphans and vulnerable children attending the school. This improves the pupils’ education by boosting nutrition and reducing food insecurity in a drought-hit area. Excess stock is sold to the community, with profits spent on new fish and running costs for the next year.
About Zambia Orphans Aid
Zambia Orphans Aid is a UK-based charity that works with grassroots partners to educate the most vulnerable children in Zambia. It achieves this by providing uniforms, books and tuition fees and funding nutritious school meals. It also helps school leavers gain vocational qualifications, gives mental health support to those that need it and provides girls with reusable sanitary pads to keep them in the classroom.
You can find out more about the charity here.
