Student Sponsoship
Minchinhampton – Nkokoto Link
How the Pupil/Student Sponsorship Scheme works:
The Minchinhampton-Nkokoto Link has been sponsoring students at the Folk Development College (FDC) in Urambo and Vumilia Secondary School ( the school where our Nkokoto students attend) for several years. Urambo is the nearest big town to Nkokoto and many Nkokoto people use Urambo as their market town. The FDC was established to educate students in the skills of carpentry, masonry (building), mechanics (male students) and needlework (female students). The cost of sponsoring each student (six each year) is now 130,000Tsh (Tanzanian shillings) each year (£125), cheap compared to higher education in the UK! So that the students can gain meaningful employment with the skills they have gained at the FDC when they finish, the Link gives them a set of appropriate tools on qualifying at the end of their course. The Link sponsors 12 students at the FDC.
Nkokoto Primary School was opened in 1974 has approximately 500 pupils aged 5 to 14, which is the usual age for primary school pupils in Tanzania. There is one Headteacher and six teachers, giving enormous class sizes of up to 100 pupils! Facilities and resources are very, very limited. Teaching tends to be instruction in Maths, Kiswahili, Science, English, R.E., Social studies, Health, Crafts, Sports and Games. The Link has focused in recent years on refurbishing the school buildings e.g. paying for concrete floors to replace the earth floors (mud in winter!), new roofing and most recently a play area and water harvesting tanks. Most pupils cannot afford to go on to secondary school simply because their parents or guardians don’t have the income to be able to afford it. Our new focus is on providing books for the students and for the school and teachers to improve the quality of education provided to the children.
The link also sponsors pupils in Vumilia Secondary school, (the local secondary school for pupils living in Nkokoto) as well as sponsoring students at the FDC. Students now do not have to pay to attend secondary school in Tanzania so the sponsorship scheme now pays for school uniform, books and equipment as well as school meals, as the majority of families are unable to afford these costs. The Link cannot respond to all requests for sponsorship and we wouldn’t have the knowledge to identify the more deserving cases, so we rely on Stima, a local authority officer, the village chairman and the Headteacher of the primary school, to advise us on sponsorship. Primary School is for pupils up to the age of 14 and provides a basic education in the core subjects. Secondary schools, many of which are boarding schools, take pupils from 14 to 18. The students we are sponsoring at the present time at Tsh150,000/£60 per year are mainly attending schools some distance from their homes in Nkokoto, varying from Vumilia (7 km from Nkokoto), Mpanda Boarding Secondary (250km) and Kibaha Secondary School, also a boarding school (600 miles away near Dar as Salem). The Link sponsors 30 students at the school by covering the costs of school uniforms, materials for learning (pens, pencils, paper, etc.,) and the loan of bicycles so that the students can get to and from school,
The Minchinhampton Nkokoto Link will also make every effort to link the UK sponsor to a pupil according to the sponsor’s wishes, e.g. if a girl pupil at a secondary school is requested or a particular student, although this may not always be possible.
The sponsorship that many people in Minchinhampton give is greatly appreciated and, without fail, will give a young Tanzanian the chance to succeed in education, opening the gateway to many opportunities in the future. If you would like to sponsor a student, please fill in the form on the reverse of this sheet and return it to Rod Harris or one of the committee members. Thank you.
Rod Harris December 2016
To download a sponsorship form please click here Sponsorship Form