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During the period, all the children were visited and followed up both at school and home. The visits allowed us to:
Monitor their academic progress, this allowed the team to understand the challenges faced by individual children in their school performance.
Give moral support to the children, their families and teachers.
Give psychosocial support to the children when they are at home and in school.
Identify their school needs like books, school fees and boarding shopping.
Account and label boarding items were given to them.
The home visits help to record their progress at home and give them psychosocial supports. Other needs need food, clothes and shelter were identified. Food and clothes were bought and given to some of the children,
Reconciliations were done during home visits between the children and parent/guardians especially in families where they had run away from early marriage or FGM.
a) Parents/guardian meetings
The first meeting for the parent/guardians was conducted in February and it was very successful. The deliverables for the meeting included:
The signing of the new MoU with all the parents/guardians. The agreement entails the role and responsibilities of TMT and each parent depending on the category of scholarship.
TMT agreed to the provision of school fees and educational materials while the parents are solely responsible for social, health and other parental responsibilities.
Parents were also to be responsible for collecting or availing the school fees structures, receipt from the previous term and report card before the next school term.
A second meeting was done in July, this meeting involved both the scholarship children and their parents. The purpose of the meeting was to:
Update the parents/guardians on the new policies for the program, in terms of responsibilities and discipline.
To update the children and parent/guardian profiles
To discuss the performance of each child.
b) Back to school
We had three school term openings during this period. The scholarship team ensured that all the children reported on time were provided with their school needs, including:
Prepared, ordered, purchased and distributed back to school shopping on time
Collected fees structure and payments of school fees
Logistics planning for some of the scholarship children to go to and from school
c) Programme Achievements and Challenges
Parent/ guardians meetings were successful with parents committing to taking more responsibility for their children
The program has identified challenges that are facing the program. A discussion was held and a plan to re-strategies the programme was set. In addition, Terry has linked to team to SOS Children’s Village to discuss a possible partnership.
The child psychologist has been very helpful to the children and the scholarship families.
Most of our children transition to the next grade in primary to secondary