We are so excited to announce that we have now secured some land to build a new primary school and nursery in Cape Maclear. The land has been gifted to the Changing Stars NGO in Malawi on a long lease by Chief Madothi of Cape Maclear. Changing Stars are hoping to raise funds to build an amazing educational facility which will give 400 students the opportunity to learn in our wonderful school, plus a further 50 children extra nursery places for local village children.
Our architects have been to visit the site as have the Malawian land registry, and Charlie is busy getting quotes for the build.
This is a huge undertaking for the charity but we know, with your help, that we can make these children’s dreams come true.
There are 20,000 people in Cape Maclear and school places are severely limited. Currently the children at the top end of the village have to walk 2 km to school each day, but 4 times a day, including them coming home for lunch. And that is if they can get a place and their parents can afford to pay.
Whilst we will be charging some children to attend the school in order to make it viable we are hoping to offer many scholarships through our sponsor programme to those children whose parents cannot afford to pay to send them to school.
The school will have two blocks of four classrooms, plus the nursery block. It will have toilet and shower blocks. It will have a science lab and library. Plus there will be offices and storage space to build. On site there will also be an agriculture teaching space, play areas and many trees which will be planted to provide shade.
Specific fundraising will be starting very soon but in the meantime you can help by sponsoring a student to attend school, as we are still running our programme with our current students in one of the other local schools in the village.
We are hoping that by building our school we will be able to take the pressure off the other schools in the area – in one school there can be 250 children in a class with one teacher.
We will be having a maximum of 50 students in each of our classes and all our teachers will receive specialised training in our adapted Malawian curriculum.
If you would like to sponsor a child then please check out our shop section where you can choose to sponsor a child’s education for the year.
