June 16, International Day of the African Child
Over 400 Million Children Live on the African Continent.
By the age of 15, only 40% will be enrolled in school.
When Tony and I were in Karonsa, Malawi on a Habitat for Humanity trip, we played games with the village children during breaks. The local Habitat leaders told us to be careful to retrieve all soccer balls and toys after each of our recesses because if the kids had a soccer ball they wouldn’t go to school.
That was in 2013. Those children are young men and women now. I wonder what happened to the little boy who played tic-tac-toe in the dirt with Tony? What about the dozens of children who would strike a pose at the sight of a camera and then shrill with excitement when I flipped it around for them to see their image?
Statistically speaking, in Malawi, only 35% will have completed Primary School. (The teacher to student ratio for first grade is 1:130.) Of those, only 8% will complete Secondary education. While Malawi is one of the poorest countries in the world, the statistics across the Continent are not tremendously better.
So where is the good news here?
The good news is there are a lot of people who want to change those statistics.
Without wells in villages, children are expected to walk to a river and bring back buckets of water for their family. Not only does this prevent them from going to school, but occasionally, children were snatched in the water by crocodiles. Scores of organizations are helping provide clean water. Just one, Living Water has dug 785 wells in Africa.
The Vodafone Foundation provides online learning materials like special tablets with zero data costs to Democratic Republic of Congo, Ghana, Lesotho, Mozambique and Tanzania.
Hope Africa, a faith based organization, provides funding for year round schooling in Malawi plus meals and water.
Oprah Winfrey’s Leadership Academy for Girls outside of Johannesburg graduates about 65 girls a year with a 90% college bound rate.
Made in the Streets, which I’m proud to volunteer with, brings ‘street kids’ out of the gutters and alleys of Nairobi and gives them a home (for many this means having their very own bed for the first time), plus daily meals along with literacy and skills training in a warm caring environment.
There are hundreds of organizations and thousand of people who are giving, teaching, leading, nursing, building, advocating for and loving children in Africa. As Brad Voss, from Made in the Streets says, “We are working together to partner with God to change lives.”
Sybil, the first female Ugandan guide. (And me with a cheesy grin.)
Also, across the Continent, young people choose to work extremely hard and take a step toward a different life. Like this young woman we met in Uganda. Sybil is the first female guide in Uganda. She said, people told her, you can’t do that, “But I just kept doing it.”
For every child that learns to read and write, for every child that learns a skill, for every child that has a secondary education, not only is their life changed, but future generations have just taken a step up.