Sponsorship

Our sponsorship program assists families with enrolling their children in public school and gives them placement priority in our tutoring program. Through our sponsorship program, we are able to pay enrollment fees, provide supplies, uniforms, transportation for older students and sanitary pads.

We also help meet needs outside of the classroom but this one is a little trickier. We don’t want people to depend on us to meet their needs, but we step in when needed. Most commonly that means bus money or a ride to the hospital in Pemba because our local clinic is out of malaria medication. The biggest thing we provide outside of the classroom is emotional support, every child needs adults to encourage and support them. The relationships our tutors have with our students, is one of the things that sets our ministry apart from the others!

Some unique ways that we help are with legal documents. A few times, we’ve had children enroll in the village school under their nickname, not a shortened version of their name but a completely different name.

While the school requires a child’s birth certificate to enroll, it is often overlooked in an effort to get the child in school because the schools knows that getting a birth certificate takes time and can be overwhelming to the parents. These parents leave the school, promising to go the next day to request a birth certificate but then life happens, and they forget.

It’s important to remember these are parents that don’t read, write or speak the national language. Getting a birth certificate would require the parent and child to go into town and wait hours, sometimes to realize they forgot something and need to return another day. Then a few weeks later, they would need to return to wait hours again, often times told to come back next week. During all of this time away who fetches water, collects fire wood and cooks meals from scratch?

When these children come to us, we ask for their birth certificates. If they don’t have one or if it’s too damaged from life in a wet mud house, our staff accompany them and their family to get such documents. The first time we had a student registered at the village school whose name didn’t match their birth certificate it was a big deal. There was even talk of the child having to start school over! It has helped that we catch these things early, not the day of a year end exam. In the end, we were able to get the name changed and now because of the relationship we have with the school they only grumble a little when we tell them we have a name change.