Giving Tuesday

We’re a few week’s away from #GivingTuesday. We hope to use 3rd December as an opportunity to raise our profile and raise some extra cash to support schools in rural Zambia.

Since January 2015, we have been supplying solar power and learning resources to the Siavonga District of Zambia. Most of the funding to set up each new school comes from grants. For about £3000, we can install solar panels to power LED lighting, laptops, a projector or TV for class lessons and the Raspberry Pi with all the off-line learning resources of RACHEL. This consists of a huge library of articles, videos and lesson plans about all subjects of the curriculum, plus advice on health, farming etc tailored for rural communities. It creates its own wifi hotspot. Users can connect via smartphone, tablet or laptop.

We think the Pi server is so useful that we should donate it to every school, clinic, library or community organisation in the District. That’s where you can help.

The new improved Raspberry Pi 4 costs from £35 to £54 depending on memory size. A power supply for it is £8.
The microsd card on which we preload all the learning resources costs £24.
A case that can be screwed securely to the wall costs £15.
Total= about £100 but the value to the recipient is priceless.

Donate here

Milz at the Hyst

Milz the Teacher, trustee of Giakonda Solar Schools Zambia, headlined at The Hyst in Swansea during the recent visit of Siavonga teachers.

It was a great evening of Reggae music.

Siavonga Teachers Visit

A bit of a gap in news doesn’t mean we’ve been idle. Following our visit in June, we had reports to write and applications for funding for the next venture. This week we are pleased to see a group of teachers from Siavonga visiting Swansea under the British Council Connecting Classrooms Scheme.

Howard has been refurbishing and installing software on laptops for them to take back. We’re also sending a Raspberry Pi Weather station which will be used by the Geography Department at Siavonga High School to add to a worldwide schools data base.

June Visit

Can’t believe we’ve been home for four weeks already! It was a very successful visit on all fronts and we’ve been busy organising information and writing reports ever since.

Feedback from schools in Zambia has been consistently positive, however after 4 years of work there, it was  time to review our activities and gain a fuller understanding of the impact of them. We set out to do this monitoring exercise with the support of The Waterloo Foundation.

We visited all 14 solar schools which have received solar panels thanks to one of the following donors:
University of Wales Trinity St Davids
S&C Electric
Hub Cymru Africa
Solar Plants
The Waterloo Foundation
Wales For Africa

Read our report here.

Also on this trip, we installed solar panels at Malimba School on behalf of Friends of Monze and held training sessions in Monze and Chilanga Districts.

Sianyoolo School

Sianyoolo is the local zone school. It runs from Grades 1 to 9 with a total of 600 pupils. The school received solar power in Feb 2017 thanks to a donation of panels by Solar Plants of Baglan Bay and other equipment  funded by Hub Cymru Africa.

We saw Grade 9 pupils working on laptops preparing for practical ICT exams. This possible because they can charge them from the solar power.

Namumu School

On 12th June we visited Namumu School. Children at Namumu School, like most of the rural schools in Siavonga District, receives food from the Zambian Government in the form of maize. The schools pay someone in the local community to boil it and that provides lunch each day. There is a shelter behind the school where children can eat. There is still a high degree of malnutrition and stunted growth in the area.

On 12th June we visited Namumu School. This school has now been connected to grid power. The solar equipment was in place but had been sidelined and the cables disconnected. Due to the fact that the cost of electricity is a drain on school resources, we intend to install a grid tie inverter and reinstate the solar set-up to feed into their grid.

We were pleased to see that the Raspberry Pi was turned on and was being used to access African Story Books and Wikipedia for Schools in particular. They had two PCs from the consignments of donated machines we sent out but were using  a laptop and teachers’ smartphones  to access the learning resources. Pupils occasionally used RACHEL independently. With a router, Namumu School will be able to network the PCs and use them to access RACHEL too.

Staff filled in our questionnaire for the impact assessment we are compiling thanks to a grant from The Waterloo Foundation