Friday June 14th

PRS Visit - Butaganzwa Commune

 

The first visit of the day was to a PRS (Promoting Rights to Schools) session going on in the Butaganzwa commune. These sessions are for teachers, community facilitators, PTA members and some students with each village in the area having a representative at the PRS session. 

Charlotte

The session we attended was delivered by Charlotte, the person responsible for education in actionaid who I first met back at the CMT meeting in Bujumbura on the first day. 

A teacher attending the PRS Training

The session was the last full day out of a three day course, as ever, Josias interpreted for me. Charlotte had the members of the session complete engaged in what they were learning with some of them participating in role playing exercises to demonstrate some of the key points trained. There are of these;

  

1. Right to free education
2. Right to no discrimination
3. Right to accessible and adequate school structure
4. Right to professional teaching
5. Right to protective non-violent environment
6. Right to appropriate education
7. Right to know their own rights
8. Right to participate in decision making
9. Right to a responsible and transparent school
10. Right to quality learning.

This is a cascade training approach where the members who attended the PRS session will go back to their communities and pass this training on. This way one PRS session can reach a very large audience.

  

Bigera - PTA Butaganzwa

Parent Teacher Associations are set up to run schools. Again, ActionAid train them up and empower them to help themselves and manage the school and it's needs. The school we visited had 443 pupils in 8 class rooms, 302 of which are boys.

The PTA itself consists of 32 members, 10 of which are women and 2 are children.

The PTA pointed out the current challenges they are faced with, they included;

• There is a need to extend the number of classrooms to core the governments directive to educate years 1-9
• There is no water supply to the school
• There is a long distance to travel for the pupils and families to buy school materials, books etc. They would like to establish a school shop.
• There are no homes for the teachers. The teachers have to travel quite a distance to get to the school each day.

AA asked them what their priority was and they gave different answers. They just didn't know what their priority was as I don't think they could see the wood through the trees. It seemed to me that they have so many issues that need addressing they could decide what should be the highest priority.

In this scenario the Ruyigi AA team gave them some direction and took their requests forward for consideration. It doesn't matter where we go, there is always an organisation, community or network of people that have valid requests but ActionAid cannot fix them all. It has a limited budget which can only stretch so far.

  

This has got Josias and thinking about the possibilities of introducing micro projects to a gift catalogue. This would mean sponsors could choose a micro project, perhaps in their child's area to make a gift contribution too and our water project in Butaganzwa will suit this nicely. ActionAid has got a long term approach to delivering aid to Burundi and the way this works when you see it in action out here is amazing. Action Aid also provide immediate support also like extending schools, adding classrooms etc. but there are so many needs in the country, ActionAid cannot deal with all of them both from a budget and resource point of view.

   

I think the sponsors in the UK would love to get involved with micro projects like this, do some fund raising towards them and even come out to visit the child they are sponsoring and take a look or even help out with the project itself. My trip out here has been unbelievable, any sponsor who comes out here will have their lives changed forever.

CAEAP Farmers Association Network visit

This farmers network was the same structure as the one we visited at Bweru, however these guys concentrated on potatoes as their main harvest. They have 13 associations as part of the network totalling 261 members.

The main impacts from the establishment of the network were; cheap seeds, food production has been greatly increased due to better quality seeds, the use of modern farming techniques and using manure from the cattle provided. This in turn raised income for the farmers.

This network was so successful that each member (261 of them) received 400kg of potatoes for that harvest. In all, 10 tonnes of potatoes were sold, 10 tonnes were given to the members and 10 tonnes were kept as seeds. A real success story.