The schoolchildren of Arri Ward need more - and better -classrooms
Donate today so Karimu can build the modern classrooms Arri’s children need
We need $243,000 to build classrooms for 9 schools.
About the campaign
Karimu owes its existence to the shock of visiting a single school that was unfit for teachers to teach in and children to learn in. That visit, by Karimu founders Don Stoll and Marianne Kent-Stoll to Ufani Primary School in 2007, was only the start. As Karimu grows and its reach expands, we find more and more teachers and children who need the same help Karimu gave Ufani Primary 18 years ago. The nine schools of Arri Ward, several miles from Ufani Primary — a vast distance in rural Tanzania, where children can’t rely on parents to drive them to school - make up a difficult learning environment. The schools are decades old and maintaining them has been a challenge for this low-income subsistence farming community. They are showing their age. Classrooms are overcrowded. Floors are dirt at worst, rough concrete at best. The walls are of exposed and crumbling brick, or, if plastered, the paint has flaked off and is now a memory. Because of the grime that has become ingrained in the walls and the stinginess with which the builders of decades ago allocated windows, the classrooms are dark, dreary places. By allowing in barely enough sunlight to read by, they provide a vivid reminder of the connection between body and spirit. Children who struggle to see their lessons in this gloom will also struggle to envision a bright future.
Now Karimu intends to bring the same dramatic improvement to Arri Ward. We intend to build modern, clean, bright, freshly painted classrooms. We intend to build spacious classrooms, so that children won’t be crammed together at desks where only the ones with sharp elbows can find room to write their assignments. We intend to build classrooms that will enable the children of Arri to take joy in learning, as do the children of Ayalagaya Ward. We intend to encourage Arri Ward’s children to dream of bright, prosperous futures.
To attain a ratio of 45 students per classroom throughout Arri Ward, we must raise the money to build one block of three classrooms and one teachers’ office for each of the nine schools. A block will cost $27,000, so we must raise $243,000.
In Arri Ward’s neighbor, Ayalagaya Ward, Karimu went on to rebuild many more schools after the initial rescue of Ufani Primary. Results throughout Ayalagaya have been inspiring: attendance has surged and so has academic performance. Perhaps most satisfying of all has been the success of Ayalagaya High School, which the ward’s other schools feed. The readiness of Ayalagaya’s children to excel in high school, thanks to their enhanced learning environments, is shown by the fact that just a few years ago Ayalagaya High was not ranked among the top 2,500 schools in Tanzania — while today it ranks consistently in the top 20, a startling achievement for a rural public school that competes with much richer urban private schools.
