School improvement in Nosy Komba, Madagascar
The School Banana in Antintorona is the heart of Sunshine in Nosy Komba. Today the school provides about 500 kids with access to a very good education level, from kindergarten to the end of secondary school. More than 100 of them live in the campus, sleep in the dorms and eat at the school canteen.
Since the start of the association, we are witnessing an increase of the success rate of the school together with a steady decrease of the school abandonment. Last year, the school had again record success rates with:
- 100% success rate in Primary school national exams (around 60% when we started the programme).
- 96% success rate in secondary school national exams - (around 30-40% when we started the programme).
- A reduction in the number of students abandoning school (in 2023, 23 students were reaching the last year of the secondary school and doing the BEPC exam, while they were around 8 to 9 when the programme started).
- 6 out of 8 students succeeding and getting access to university, increasing the number of students at the university (now 20) supported to the Sunshine in Nosy Komba scholarship.
This success is also reflected in the number of students enrolled in the School Banana, some of them coming from far away locations. The number of students grew steadily in the last years, increasing from about 350 students to more than 500. Moreover, due to the economic consequences of COVID-19, several schools of the region are currently in very bad conditions, increasing even more this tendency. Because of that, School Banana is currently exceeding the available capacity. This is a concern for us because we must avoid a decrease in the level of the education that is granted to the children due to the lack of space. Therefore, we would like to ensure the correct operations of the school and guarantee the wellbeing of the students and teachers.
For this reason, and as part of the Education project of Sunshine in Nosy Komba, we would like to initiate a new project for the enhancement of the School Banana. This enhancement will target the preparation of the land near to the current school area, the construction of a new building(s) and recreational area and the corresponding refurbishment, to accommodate additional space for:
- 4 to 6 Classrooms to allow students and teachers to have a comfortable and adequate space to study.
- Dormitory rooms to allow more students, especially from different villages, to sleep over during raining season.
- Physics and chemistry experiments.
- Storage school and sports material.
- Outdoor Sport activities, group activities, having lunches, etc.
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This is a large and complex project that will take place in 2024-2025 running from 2 to 3 years until completion, and require close cooperation between the associations and groups working to help the people of Nosy Komba, in particular with We Work it Works.
At the moment we are defining the technical implementation and looking for different fund sources to make this project happen.
We are very excited and looking forward to starting with this project very soon and share the developments with you.