Thanks to our many donors, partners and communities, Partners in Education Ethiopia received $1.4 million in donations and contributions last year, enabling us to continue our work even through challenging times, and to move forward with expanding programs, partnerships, and projects.
School Infrastructure
We are on schedule to open 4 new schools in 2022, bringing our total to 20. Our training workshops and follow-up classroom support, which introduce differentiated instruction to meet individual student needs, objective focused learning, unit planning and other essential learner- oriented practices, have already begun in our new schools, and continue in the existing ones.
Programs
Some of our teaching initiatives have received recognition beyond the local community level to the point where, as an example, one woreda/district education office has ordered green chalk boards similar to ours to be instituted in all of its schools. These paint-based blackboards extend the entire width of the wall so that numerous students are able to actively participate at the same time. We are very proud of this multiplier effect of our work. The pictures below show existing black boards in one of our schools and in a school that we will rebuild in 2022.
The gardening and greening programs are proving to be very successful with some schools now earning income from sales of the produce. Teachers are becoming engaged in using the gardens as educational tools, and some of the teachers and students are working on developing soap-based insecticides.
With the direct contributions of several donors, our special needs programs are flourishing in a number of our schools, as can be seen in the attached picture.
Other projects
Two of our high schools are now involved in interconnectivity projects; one of them in collaboration with the US based Internet Society and the other with the support of a BC based Compassionate Eye Foundation. These projects will bring power as well as the internet and web-based learning resources and training to the schools.
Preliminary feedback from our translanguaging research project, which is being conducted in cooperation with the University of London (Birkbeck), indicates that students and teachers are vastly increasing their skills in a much broader sense than just improving English language fluency. They report increased awareness and use of different learning resources such as magazines and social media, increased vocabulary, and enhancement of cooperative learning and relationships among peers and teachers.
We have established several new partnerships that are bringing health and sanitation related services and information to our schools and the communities surrounding them. Operation Eyesight also continues to be a critical partner to this end, along with two different hospitals and three different universities.
Moving forward
We are very proud that our very dedicated and empathetic staff and their friends have contributed to a fund from which they purchased and distributed wheat, school supplies, and books for the many thousand students who have been displaced from their homes in the northern region of Ethiopia due to the recent crisis there. These students have increased our total student body to over 30,000.
As can be seen in the blackboard picture and the classroom pictures below, the conditions in some existing schools in the region are still shockingly poor by our standards and there is no end of such schools, and therefore potential projects, in sight.
This has been an amazing year for Partners, filled with successes and challenges that would not have been possible without the help of our many supporters. We are increasingly gaining national as well as international recognition and support. We look forward to building more schools while focusing on new partnerships and programs to ensure that all children have access to quality education and dedicated teachers.