Chalizya Primary School
Improving access to education
We’ve worked with Chalizya Primary School since 2011 when we first visited and helped erect a number of classroom structures. In 2018 we returned to build seven new classrooms – in seven days!
- Classroom construction, for improved learning conditions
- Improvement to teachers’ houses, to encourage long-term staff tenure
- Teachers’ stipends, to increase teacher:pupil ratio
- Water sourcing, to improve attendance and wellbeing
- Farm project, to generate income for the school, for resources and food diversity
Our objectives: removing barriers to accessing education.
Our strategy: improved facilities encourage more learners. Increased teacher numbers and reduced staff turnover improves consistency. Local access to water improves performance and increases attendance by children not having to choose between fetching water and going to school.
Delivery: identifying need with the local community is our priority. Understanding why children can’t attend is fundamental to developing an appropriate strategy. Rain stops lessons when you don’t have a roof. Cultural attitudes to menstruation prevents girls attending regularly. Crowded classrooms reduce effectiveness. Where families live hand-to-mouth, they have to choose between harvesting and school. If you have to walk 3 miles and queue for hours at an ineffective pump to fetch water for the family, that becomes your priority. We have worked with the village community to identify solutions that we can help implement, to keep their children in school.
Impact: attendance has increased significantly over the years we have been involved. At the outset, only one child had ever gone from here on to secondary school – 25 miles away. This year alone (2025) fifteen children have been selected to do so and in its area Chalizya is one of the top-performing schools for graduation rates.
Our projects have been developed hand-in-hand with the community and rely on active partnering with them to implement successfully. They provide a significant portion of labour and materials to carry out capital works; the recent farming project, through our mentoring, has been instigated and funded entirely by the community. We work towards self-sustaining projects across our portfolio.