The following blog has been written by Ibrahim Kamara, the creator, and teacher, of the Empowering Children School in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Sam Whitaker met Ibrahim in May 2015 and a friendship was created. Between them they collated their ideas to launch Edu Sierra Leone. There is still much to do but please read below to find out why it really is ‘work that matters’.
Still struggling with words, how to get this explanations all started. But still, We were on the fight to bring a dream to reality. A vision which aims at opening the door of learning to everyone in Sierra Leone. the edu Sierra Leone is a key which is preparing to help open the success of children and schools. It is what The Empowering Children School believe in.
The Empowering Children school is a small learning institution in Congo town, Congo town is a community around Freetown. Instead of kids go sell cakes, pepper, oil, fry fish etc which is not a promising future for the children, let them come here and be empowered “Tomorrow’s start here”. This school believes technology can help in education just as it is helping in agriculture, finance, communication etc, but the school never have the opportunities for it’s teachers and students to get rich access to this tools for students and teachers to use for quicker academic achievement. We hoping that one day we will be fortunate to be enriched with this tools. Still, Edu Sierra Leone brought the hope. The online learning platform can help students and teachers quickly access resources not just for teachers and students in the school this time round, but for teachers and students in schools country wide. What a blessing for Sierra Leone.
Currently it’s six days in a week, one day [Saturday] is added to the normal five schooling days and one hour is added to the normal six hours time spent in schools. All schools social activities and holidays had turn off so that schools will able to achieve their goals within six months. The syllabus which we normally covered in one year is now going to be covered within six month, this is what’s had changed the normal routine, and had pose a very big challenge for both the government and non government schools, yet, time, resources, infrastructures lack and not there to ease this problems.
The school infrastructures in Sierra Leone cannot accommodate all the children, populated classrooms are common just to squeeze so that every child can have access to learning, it still stand challenging and scaring schools with the Ebola various in the country