Owen Choongo is just 17, but he has been the sole provider for his siblings since his mother left them over two years ago.
Shouldering that burden hasn’t been easy for the teenager, and he often skips school to do odd jobs to earn what he can. He was doing just that when Newsweek visited his school, Chibote Primary School in Zambia’s rural Namwala District, in July.
When he showed up, he told Newsweek through a translator that he has to accept jobs when he can get them because otherwise, he and his siblings won’t be able to eat.
Choongo is among the students identified as at high risk of dropping out of school by the Empowering Vulnerable Children with Education (EVE) Project, an initiative implemented by the nonprofit Education Above All Foundation’s Educate A Child program and World Vision in collaboration with Zambia’s Ministry of Education and the Forum for African Women Educationalists of Zambia (FAWEZA).
Launched in October 2022, the project is working to keep children like Choongo in school.
Zambia has made significant progress in improving access to education in recent years, after implementing an Education-for-All policy that made education free in 2021.
But there are still significant challenges due to costs of uniforms, books and other expenses, particularly for children in rural areas, and other factors including long distances to school, early marriage and teenage pregnancy.
In the Namwala District, one of the country’s most marginalized areas, the dropout rate in 2019 was 5.3 percent—60 percent of them girls, according to World Vision Zambia.
There, the project has taken action to address those challenges, including by providing 900 bicycles to those students who otherwise have to walk hours to get to and from school each day. Nine wheelchairs have also been given to children with disabilities to help them stay in school.
A key aspect of the project is an “early warning system” used to identify the at-risk children by tracking their attendance, behavior and course performance. Stay-in-school committees, made up of parents and members of the community, have also been mobilized to work with school officials to identify and monitor the students at risk of dropping out.
How a Bicycle Changed a Student’s Life
Webster Shampuwo, 17, a student at Shamutiki School, said that his new bicycle has been invaluable in helping him stay in school. A journey that used to take him over an hour to walk now takes less than 20 minutes.
“Now I am always on time,” he told Newsweek through a translator.
Newsweek also visited Shampuwo’s home in a village called Sichepa, where he demonstrated how he also uses the bicycle to do chores such as fetching water from a well and gardening.
Nearby, Shampuwo’s mother, Patient Shampuwo, was working in a field with an infant strapped to her front. A single mother of nine, she has struggled to afford the costs associated with sending her son to school, but is pleased with the progress he has made.
He said he was encouraged to return to school by the Stay In School Committee after dropping out in 2015, when he was living with an uncle who he said kept him at home to work herding cattle.
“It was painful because my uncle’s children used to come to school and I used to stay at home,” he said.
Another student who returned to school in October with the encouragement of the committee is Precious Himweeba.
Himweeba, 22, from the Chibule area, had dropped out after becoming pregnant at 15 and then getting married. But she left her husband after seeing he was unable to support her or her son, she told Newsweek through a translator.
It’s important for her to stay in school now, Himweeba said, as she dreams of becoming a nurse.
“I’m hoping for a brighter future, I want a good life,” she said.
Creating a Conductive Environment
The project has also focused on creating a conducive environment for students, said Sydney Simubwa, the EVE Project manager at World Vision.
In order to prevent girls from staying at home while menstruating, shower and wash facilities have been built in schools, and clubs have been set up where students stitch reusable sanitary towels.
“They have access to those modern toilets, they have access to those modern shower rooms,” Simubwa told Newsweek. “So we’ve seen that these have encouraged learners to come back to school.”
Shamikobo Kebby, the head teacher of Shamutiki School, attributes the project’s interventions to the student population at his school almost doubling in just three years. There were 365 students attending the school in 2022, but that has now climbed to 645, he told Newsweek.
“We saw the reduction of absenteeism from the learners,” Kebby said. “The performance in classes started going up.”
Teachers have also been trained on how to support the children at risk of dropping out, and savings groups have been set up to help mothers start and grow their own businesses.
“We’re really fostering, sort of an entrepreneurship spirit within the groups of people that we working with,” Marc Nosbach, national director of World Vision Zambia, told Newsweek. “It just helps them as a stepping stone to increase, diversify their livelihoods.”
The project is set to end in October, but the initial target of reaching 7,000 at-risk children has already been reached, Nosbach said.
He said that during a severe drought in Zambia last year, the project also provided meals for more than 100,000 children.
“We actually saw a lot of children potentially dropping out of school or being under the threat of staying at home, because there’s just not enough food within the communities,” he said. “It was really important, because otherwise, children would have completely dropped out from school and stayed behind.”
Another success of the project is that the Stay in School Committees also ensured that more than 1,000 children who had dropped out of school were brought back.
That’s a “really remarkable unintended, positive consequence,” Derek Langford, senior engagement specialist at Education Above All’s Educate A Child program, told Newsweek.
The project was aimed at children “who are in school but are dangerously close to dropping out,” he said. “But they have actually enrolled more than 1,000 out-of-school children.”
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