KARAGITA, NAIVASHA – The Oshwal Education and Relief Board (OERB) through its funding arm, Oshwal AID, has pledged to support the education of children at the Naivasha-based Children’s Village Trust to the tune of Ksh3.6 million.
The OERB, the education and relief arm the Oshwal Community in Kenya, on Saturday donated the first tranche of Ksh1.2 million for its first year of support to The Children’s Village, which will go towards paying teachers’ salaries under the newly introduced home schooling programme. The Children’s Village will receive Ksh1.2 million annually for the next three years.
The Children’s Village in January introduced its home schooling programme using a child centered methodology anchored on the Kenyan curriculum’s schemes of work. The children at the Village are mostly orphans and those from extremely disadvantaged backgrounds and who for whatever reason cannot live with their biological parents. .
“Homeschooling resonates with OERB which supports the one-on-one, child-focused teaching model,” said Dharmesh Shah from OERB. “That’s why we will be giving Ksh1.2 million per year to cater for teachers’ salaries.”
Dharmesh said The Children’s Village was addressing the needs of some of the most vulnerable people in society by empowering them for the future.
The Children’s Village, started three years ago, accommodates 42 children aged between three and 15 years, said Riyaz Hasham, a Children’s Village Director. He said the home centre has a capacity of 108 children but is taking in children in line with available resources.
Hasham said The Children’s Village adopted the homeschooling model after experiencing challenges in integrating some of the children in conventional schools. “Normal schools were not helping them much,” he said. “We have older children who had never gone to school and normal classes turned into a nightmare for them. That was demoralising them, while others are slow learners yet they are treated as normal in the large classes.”
Under the home-schooling model, teachers have a personalised relationship with the children. Each child’s strengths and weaknesses are profiled and an appropriate teaching/learning methodology is applied.
Eight months after implementing homeschooling, Hasham says there has been notable improvement in the children’s learning, with a majority beginning to appreciate education. “Those who were thought to be slow learners have turned out to be bright students. All they needed was attention.”
The Children’s Village consists of 14 x 3 bed-roomed houses in addition to the general recreation area containing an administration block with clinic and storage rooms. It places strong emphasis on the integration of the children into their surrounding environment, as well as on their interface and contact with neighboring communities.
“We want to see them grow into successful adults. For us, each child is a success story,” Hasham added.
Creating a home feel
Each of these ‘families’ of eight children lives in its own three bed-roomed home and organises and fits out according to its needs and tastes. The house-mother is the primary caregiver and is responsible for managing the home and ensuring that each child get the social and psychological attention that they need.
Sub-Saharan Africa is home to over 45 million orphaned children. That’s more than the total number of children under the age of 18 living in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Norway and Sweden combined.
A good number of these children have lost their parents to disease and /or poverty, while many have often been abused, neglected or just abandoned. Without any family to care for them, inevitably these children will almost always end up on the streets – where they are forced to live in deplorable conditions.
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