2020 is a momentous year for the Trust. Finally we have the food hall and kitchen completed which will allow the children to be on more than one meal a day and join the Namibian Schools Food Programme.
The building has been a collaboration between the Namibian Government, some funding from the New Zealand Government and some work from the Trust. We are very proud of this achievement as it has been a long term goal of Mr Zauana and Mrs Zuana to ensure that the children’s health and wellbeing is supported in this way.
We hope to visit Namibia in June and hold an opening celebration which will mean an enormous amount to the learners, teachers and the local community.
LEARNERS ACHIEVEMENTS
We are delighted to confirm that the achievement of the learners at Ehomba School has continued to rise. At the beginning of the our work there in 2007, the children were not even registering on the league tables. The most recent results have Ehomba School at second for reading and mathematics out od the 54 schools in the Kunene region.
Given that these children began without even having access to the assessment papers, we are very proud of the fact that we have been able to support the learning achievements which have been driven by the teachers in the region with such enormous results.
We continue to attribute this to the leadership work that Mary Green has undertaken with the teachers and the use of the Jolly Phonics learning tool which has delivered such great results in English improvement as well as advancement in the native language. Exceptionally, this learning programme, based on phonics, appears to be highly effective for both groups.
LEARNER NUMBERS CONTINUE TO EXPAND
When the Namibian Education Trust began there were only 120 children at Ehomba School. Today there are over 350 learners who attend school each day and their levels are from new entrants right through to Grade 10.
Many learners are going onto further education as a result of this new opportunity and the numbers of learners who continue to come from surrounding districts to the Ehomba School continue to expand.
It is to the great credit of Mr and Mrs Zauana, the Principal and Head of the Junior School, that they have continued to be able to attract high quality teachers in the most demanding of circumstances to continue to provide a learning experience for these children that would otherwise be denied.
2020-2021 PROJECTS AHEAD
We still intend to improve the teacher accommodation at Ehomba School. At this stage teachers still have to live in far from satisfactory conditions, sharing space in very inadequate buildings in some instances. We have some resource already available and intend to continue to fundraise for the balance so that three single teacher units and a new Principal’s accommodation can be built in the next two years.
