Winner ‒ Investing in Education: The Anglo American Chairman’s Fund Rural Schools Progamme
With most schools in rural areas facing abject poverty, overcrowding, lack of resources and facilities, the cry for help is loud and desperate. Rural children want to compete on an equal footing with their urban brothers and sisters.
Anglo American South Africa has answered this call with its Rural Schools Programme aimed at ameliorating the situation in Limpopo.
The programme has helped rural schools in the province to build proper classrooms and school facilities, which has made a difference to the lives of thousands of children. It was started by Anglo American in 1975 to provide support for classroom building in rural communities and to address the problems facing rural education.
The programme is a good example of the type of projects the mining giant’s Chairman’s Fund supports. The fund is a dedicated instrument through which Anglo American channels its social investment in South Africa and is constantly rated as one of the country’s top corporate social investment vehicles. The fund has a budget of R54-million a year.
In 2006 the Chairman’s Fund invested 36% of its budget in education, of which the Rural Schools Programme received a hefty chunk.
With the Limpopo education department the fund formed a three-year, R30-million public-private partnership in 2003 to provide additional classrooms and basic facilities for the rural schools in the Sekhukhune district. The partnership is the largest private project in South Africa for the development of education.
”Sekhukune was selected specifically as an area of strategic importance to Anglo Platinum,” says Paul Pereira, communications manager of Tshikululu Social Investments, who manages the fund. He says the framework of the partnership not only looks at the infrastructural backlog objectives of the intervention, but includes teacher development and maths and science advancement.
He says the provincial department of education was understandably under enormous pressure to decrease the number of schools where children were taught under trees or in mud structures. The fund has tried to help fill that need.
The programme was rewarded for its work by winning the Investing in Education award at this year’s Investing in the Future Awards. The judges were impressed with the fund’s commitment to supporting development initiatives directed towards the alleviation of poverty, the upliftment of the general community and its commitment to alleviate the problem of overcrowding facing many rural schools.
Since its inception the Chairman’s Fund has funded the building of 16 schools in Limpopo. In the past few years nine schools have benefited in the Magakala area and eight schools in the Apel area of Sekhukune.
In the final leg of the programme the fund will provide administrative facilities, science laboratories and training requirements for thousands of schoolchildren. Four of the top-performing maths and science secondary schools from the programme were selected for this phase.
It has been observed that schools which have strong leaders, motivated educators, enthusiastic learners and a committed governing body have a much greater chance of attaining better-quality education and tertiary levels, Pereira says.
”The element observed in various schools has been crucial to the sustainability objectives of this programme’s intervention,” he says. The fund also visits the schools and its communities to investigate the reach of the project.
In Sekhukune, which has an unusually high rate of illiteracy, poverty and unemployment, better schools have made a difference to the community. Tlounare Senior Secondary School in Apel is one of the schools that has benefited from the programme.
The school has created a better learning environment for its learners. It received a number of trophies from the education department for its excellent matric results. Teachers also received further training that improved their school management and development skills. They attended a number of workshops on school safety, HIV/Aids awareness and drug and alcohol abuse among others.
Another school that was able to turn itself around with help from the fund is Phafane Secondary School. The school was started in 1992 in Madifahlane village. Children used to walk long distances to get to school, but the fund helped with transport.
Moloke Combined School, based in Apel, is also a success story. It was established in 1993. About 20% of its pupils come from Makontsane village, where the school is located. The rest of its learners travel from surrounding villages, some as far as 60km away, yet the school has delivered fair academic results.
At Mokhulwane Secondary School in Ga-Nchabaleng village the learners burst with pride about their sporting achievements. The school was established in 1974 and registered as a technical high school in 1990. As one of the only schools in an area, where the majority of the people are unemployed and depend on the social grants, it carries a huge responsibility to empower its local community.
The fund has enabled learners to participate in activities, including soccer, softball, netball, volleyball, choral music, athletics, indoor games and traditional games. The fund has helped schools to build new infrastructure, such as water tanks, boreholes and perimeter fencing. Pereira says the fund does not just develop schools because they are poor. Specific criteria are used to select schools.
”Because of the socio-economic circumstances of most of the rural areas, the fund looks at the community to see if parents are involved in efforts to improve the quality of their children’s education,” says Pereira.
The fund also looks at whether the school has engaged successfully in building these projects in the past. Teachers and principals have to demonstrate that they are dedicated to improving the quality of teaching through participation in workshops run by the department and other organisations. The fund also focuses on positive matric results.
”Fundamental to the success of this programme has been the relationship with the Limpopo education department, engagement with schools, communities and education officials at provincial and district level,” says Pereira. ”It has been observed that schools with strong leaders, motivated educators, enthusiastic learners and a committed school governing body have a much greater chance of accessing and attaining better quality education at tertiary levels.”
Pereira says in future the fund would like to focus on other provinces, such as the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal, if logistics allow.