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Yoliswa Dube
RURAL children across the country face a bleak future if communities continue to take a back seat. They attend primary schools with dilapidated infrastructure and later secondary schools with both inadequate classrooms and limited learning materials. They continue to record low pass rates and those in Matabeleland region leave school for neighbouring South Africa where they seek menial jobs.

The rural pupils therefore face very unique challenges and as such their learning environment is not conducive. Although government has made significant strides in developing rural schools, more needs to be done to ensure children living in these areas enjoy quality education.

People like Collin Nyabadza, a former teacher at Tjewondo Primary School in Maphisa, Matabeleland South Province, had to watch children fail to realise their full potential, year in and year out until he and other partners joined forces to try and empower youngsters growing in rural areas.

He mooted the idea to start an organisation that helps rural schools with furniture, the building of classrooms, sports equipment and sanitary wear.

Nyabadza invited different individuals who could have failed to realise their full potential had someone not helped them.

“Children in the rural areas don’t know about scholarships, cadetship or things like that. When teachers tell these children about what they can become, they take it like folklore. It’s like they’re being told about umvundla lo nteletsha when you tell a child in the rural areas they can be a doctor,” said Ronald Ncube, a board member of the Collin Nyabadza Children’s Voice Charitable Trust, an organisation which seeks to create an enabling environment for children to learn and realise their full potential.

Tjewondo Primary School is evidence of what can be achieved when communities unite for a greater purpose.

“There weren’t enough classrooms at Tjewondo and I remember when we were in Grade One and Two, we used to learn under trees. Nyabadza would organise school trips, furniture for the school and things like that. Together with the headmaster Nyathi, they worked very hard and a number of structures were built at the school,” said Ncube.

He recalls how the school was eventually developed to accommodate all pupils.

“We even had extra blocks at school because everyone could be accommodated into classrooms and we had a functional library. I only discovered later that there were schools that had no library because we had a fully furnished library where you could go and get a book to read every week if you wanted to,” said Ncube.

He said the education of the girl child was most affected due to the unavailability of sanitary wear in rural areas.

“A lot of girls in the rural areas don’t have access to sanitary wear. Sanitary wear costs $1 but they don’t have that $1. It doesn’t only affect their education but their self-esteem is also affected,” he said.

The heroes in this story are the teachers. They have to teach in morale sapping environments using minimum resources.

Yet, yearly, they go back to these rural schools to do their best to assist these pupils.

The Collin Nyabadza Children’s Voice Charitable Trust recently donated a consignment of furniture to Majiji Primary School in Bubi District, Matabeleland North Province where Early Childhood Development classrooms look like homesteads.

They resemble huts with the interior comprising only a few learning charts while the bare ground they learn from is covered with sacks.

“Every day, when they say they’re going to school, this is where they’ll be coming to. You can’t have children learning in such an environment. Because they’ve a few benches, they can’t sit on them; they instead kneel on the floor and use the benches as desks. Because all of them can’t fit into classrooms, some have to learn under trees. But if everybody puts in enough effort, we can improve rural schools. It doesn’t matter who you are, all we need is the extra effort,” said Ncube.

Majiji Primary School has not been the only beneficiary of this project. Other rural schools around the country have also received donations aimed at improving the education of their children.

“We’re working in six districts at the moment and we try to distribute whatever we get evenly among these districts. We’ve a consignment of 2,000 books that’s already in the country which we’ll distribute to 13 schools. We’re also working on another project that will bring in 45,000 books which we hope will be in the country soon. This will be stocked in libraries at schools across the country,” said Ncube.

“We’re looking at people that are vulnerable in society such as children. Besides being vulnerable, these children are the future of the country. A large number of the country’s population resides in the rural areas and this is where you find the poorest people.”

Ncube said the only way of stopping the poverty cycle was by providing a good education.

“We could organise food hampers and maize but after a while, this food will run out. But if we empower their children through education, we’ve empowered the whole family and we’ve changed their future. For example, I don’t think as long as l’m alive, my family will ever be the same because coming from the rural areas, I’ve managed to go to school through scholarships and so forth,” he said.

Building adequate infrastructure at institutions in rural areas will make a bigger difference than just taking one child per village to school.

That way, everyone benefits and is empowered in such a way that they are able to dream big and achieve their goals.