RIPPLE Africa supports secondary education in Malawi through the complete construction and continued support of Kapanda Community Day Secondary School. In Malawi, primary school attendance is high. However, only 13% of secondary school age children actually attend secondary school. This is partly due to expensive school fees, but is equally an issue of local access. In the Nkhata Bay District, there are just 37 secondary schools compared to 184 primary schools (for more information, please read the section about Secondary Education in Malawi, Africa, on the General Information About Education in Malawi page). Before RIPPLE Africa, students in our local area had to walk 13km each way to attend the nearest secondary school, and were in desperate need of a local secondary school of their own. RIPPLE Africa began to raise money for Kapanda in 2007, and by March 2008 we had opened our doors. Kapanda Secondary School has all four classes from Form 1 to Form 4, and we have registered Kapanda as a government school, which means we have access to three government teachers, and the partnership of education officers in the district. However, this support is still nowhere near what Kapanda needs to function, so RIPPLE Africa supplies additional teachers, books, desks, resources, and our overseas volunteers provide a valuable resource to students in the classroom.
Building Kapanda Secondary School has been a significant venture, and is RIPPLE Africa’s most important educational achievement to date. RIPPLE Africa has constructed two double classroom blocks which provide four large classrooms, together with building teachers’ houses, toilet blocks, teachers’ offices and a secure storeroom, as well as a football pitch, netball court, and an experimental teaching garden for our agriculture students. Despite these achievements, RIPPLE Africa is still in desperate need of more funding to continue to build the school. In order for Kapanda to be fully registered, the charity also needs to build a laboratory, a library, and more teachers’ houses (one for every teacher and school administrator at the school — a practice adopted throughout Malawi and an essential element in attracting good teachers to the school). RIPPLE Africa urgently needs donors to help fund these remaining costs to build more facilities at the school.
Access to quality secondary school education is a critical factor to the development of Malawi, and to Africa in general. Without Kapanda Secondary School, hundreds of students each year would have to travel great distances to attend secondary school, or wouldn’t be attending secondary school at all. Although so much good has already been done, it is essential that RIPPLE Africa is able to complete Kapanda to finish the project. Building a laboratory, library, and more teachers’ houses would entitle Kapanda to more government support, and would make the school one of the best community day secondary schools in Nkhata Bay District. Out of the 37 secondary schools in the district, only nine of them have laboratories, of which only four are labelled as “conventional,” and only two are adequate enough to be test centres. Without a laboratory, Kapanda cannot even begin to teach physics or biology (subjects on which students are tested in their national examinations), and a good library is needed to house more books which are subject-specific to secondary learning. Even if we manage to build these things, we still desperately need more teachers’ houses! Although the necessity for teachers’ houses might seem strange in the UK, the reality is that without more teachers’ houses, we cannot attract new teachers to the area, and the school will never be able to compete for the best people to help the local children. A teacher’s house is as important as the teachers themselves in being able to provide for the students.
It costs RIPPLE Africa an ongoing monthly sum to support Kapanda Community Day Secondary School. However, most of the funding we urgently require is for one-off capital projects which will provide a lasting value to the school and to thousands of children for years to come. We need ambitious and dedicated donors to help us raise money for these big projects:
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