1. Education based around school kitchen gardens

Since 2011, eight primary schools have benefited from a school kitchen garden supervised by our certificated agriculturist and managed by a local management committee pursuing the following objectives:

– A source of funding via the sale of harvests, which helps families pay tuition fees and improve school resources

– A teaching tool, providing a location for continuing education for teachers

– An ideal teaching tool for primary school pupils to learn a wide range of subjects

– A source of food, which is no small matter given the state of child undernutrition

Since 2013, 150 teachers have received training based on the educational use of school kitchen gardens from four Belgian volunteer teachers

For the future, our objectives are:

– Aim for the financial independence of schools through increased sale of kitchen garden harvests (four out of the eight schools are already independent).

– Spread the teaching model taught: This training is already in a good position to be perpetuated due to the initiative of school principals. They have offered training modules to student teachers who have come for a placement at their school.

2. Creation of a public library and cinema

It took a year for Comequi volunteers and the local team to collect nearly 14,000 books and put them in a secondary school in Minova! Documents, novels, comic strips, dictionaries, atlases and encyclopaedias … Everything is useful for learning, culture and not to mention entertainment. Some of the children’s books were taken to four partner primary schools. Our local Comequi expert was responsible for organising ways to keep the public coming back and reading-related activities.

A film room was set up and opened in the rooms of this partner secondary school. The local Comequi expert is responsible for organising entertainment (films) and educational (reports and documentaries) screenings for young people, and the less young.