The charity literally fund raises and passes it on to educational projects in Africa. In January four of the charity’s trustees volunteered at the Kwinella Lower Basic School and saw first hand how living in poverty affects children and their education.

Whilst in The Gambia they witnessed how cattle and other domestic animals would walk into the school grounds disrupting the lessons and eat the plants. They also saw how children were able to enter the school and leave without permission making it extremely difficult to monitor attendance. A further disruption for the children’s learning is people from the wider community entering the school grounds daily to collect water from the borehole FSF installed. This is very distracting for the pupils and whilst FSF fully appreciate the need for the community to have access to clean water, it is difficult to ensure the pupil’s safety when anyone can enter the school at anytime. Not only is it disrupting but the school borehole is unable to provide enough water for both the school and the community, resulting in low water pressure at the school.

So…
To solve the two problems:
Passingiton raised enough funding to fence the whole school premises.
The fencing will solve all of the difficulties discussed by preventing animals from entering the site, allowing effective registers to be taken at the school with teachers being able to monitor individual attendance.
FSF raised funds to provide the village with a clean water supply so that once the fencing is up the villagers can still access clean and safe water. The supply will be powered by solar panels and there will be taps allocated in various parts of the village.

The additional water supply will reduce the current chronic water shortage that the village is experiencing  and it will reduce the water borne diseases the villagers suffer from at present.
Both FSF and the villagers have been contributing financially towards this vital project and there is an outstanding balance of £2068 needed to complete the project. Ideally, FSF would like to have completed the village water project before September when the new academic year starts to reduce the disruption of villagers collecting their daily water from the school borehole.

If you would like to help FSF fund raise for this last instalment please do not hesitate to contact us for ideas and resources.