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KRUGER NATIONAL PARK
On the western fringe of South Africa’s world-renowned Kruger National Park, lies the Sabi Sand - an area given over to private wildlife reserves that boast some of Africa’s finest ecotourism game lodges. These enterprises fuel the local economy and provide employment for large numbers of staff and rangers from the poor local communities that, in turn, fringe the Sabi Sand.
All of the lodges seek to put something back into these communities, but the leaders by far in achieving real success in community uplift are the teams from the & Beyond Foundation and the Londolozi Learning Centre, with whom Africa Foundation works.
Appeals
Centres for Orphaned and Vulnerable Children
Extending a successful model to transform hundreds of young lives
Meet Lotus Khoza, & Beyond Foundation’s Senior Development Officer in the region. There is nothing Lotus doesn’t know about the needs of people in the communities fringing the Sabi Sand. Born in one of the communities, he grew up alongside, lives alongside and works side-by-side with the community leaders, school governing bodies, teachers and carers in all eight of their communities as well as with central government departments - identifying the most pressing needs of these poor rural people.
For him the greatest challenge is to find a way to care for the many children who each year are orphaned by AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis.
Lotus will tell you that the key is to keep them in their families, rather than institutionalising them in orphanages. “In many instances it is older children who now head up these families - all the adults have died - and they have to care for large numbers of vulnerable siblings.”
Led by Lotus, & Beyond Foundation’s response to this has been to work with the community to set up a successful prototype centre in the Lillydale community. Children can come to the centre for support with their school work, for one or two healthy meals a day, for mentoring and advice and for fun in the playground. They are encouraged to bring their school friends and to feel at home. In fact the centre serves as a home from home when their home carers are still at work or away from home. The centre also offers help and advice to the surrogate parents. And the government provides financial support for “parents” whose children use the centre.
But this is just one community. There are hundreds if not thousands of similarly affected children and families in the other Sabi Sand communities and Lotus wants to roll out the Lillydale model and set up five new day care centres along the same lines in Justicia, Huntington, Somerset, Hluvukani and Dumphries communities - each with a meeting room, a kitchen facility, and a playground - with a proper water supply laid on. And the community already has the carers to staff them.
Help Africa Foundation enable Lotus and the concerned and caring community leaders to build and equip these five centres and transform the lives of hundreds of destitute young people. Help us provide the £23,000 needed for each of these centres - £115,000 in all.
Download a print friendly Pdf of the Kruger National Park case study
The Londolozi Learning Centre
Computers for competence
Meet Mo Groch and her daughter, Kate. They run the Londolozi Learning Centre in the Sabi Sand under the auspices of the Varty family’s Good Work Foundation - and you will go a long way to find two more passionate and dedicated people in this field.
With the Londolozi Learning Centre as their central hub, they are opening up a series of new hubs or centres in the Sabi Sand communities, where people can get basic literacy training, learn how to use and maintain computers, and receive health education to help combat the spread of disease in the area.
They already have the literacy and health programmes running, but for them the thing that will do more to lift many of these people to another level and enable them to succeed in the modern world is the ability to use computers - for education, for work and as a social tool.
They will tell you that connectivity is the key. “Just think what a difference could be made to the way people think and learn in these remote rural communities, if we can connect them to other young minds and open up libraries and data sources across the world. Barriers will drop and people’s lives can be transformed for the better,” says Mo excitedly.
The problem is that in these rural schools right now, all too often teachers are unable (or afraid) to use computers when they are available and therefore do not teach their pupils how to work with them; or teachers with full programmes are simply not able to take time for computer lessons - and frequently there are hardware and network problems for which there is no technical back up.
Mo and Kate have designed a programme to overcome all these problems. They have trained up three local people as computer facilitators, who are currently training a further 15 facilitators and are now ready to launch their “Digital Literacy” programme in five schools in the communities to equip the children with all the computer skills they may need to compete in the working world of today.
Help Africa Foundation make it possible for Mo and Kate to realise their dream and connect these children with the rest of the modern world. Help us provide the £28,000 they need to make this possible.
Download a print friendly Pdf of the Londolozi Learning Centre