Girls can’t go to college or get jobs if they don’t successfully graduate from high school. And they won’t complete high school if they don’t first learn what they should in junior high.
75 Bumpeh Chiefdom 9th grade girls are completing a new tutoring program designed to help them pass their junior high completion exam. In its first five months, it’s exceeding our initial expectations.
The chiefdom’s drop-out rate from junior to senior high has typically been 50%. It’s a combination of inability to continue paying for school and not being well prepared academically for senior high. Many families just can’t pay beyond junior high. If students don’t pass their junior high exam, it’s that much harder for parents to pay for them to repeat a grade. Even if they pass, they may still struggle with senior high subjects.
With your support for the Girls Scholarship Program, Sherbro Foundation has been addressing the cost problem. We want to remove inability to pay as a barrier to girls continuing into senior high.
Now we’re tackling the knowledge deficiency problem.
The tutoring program is the brainchild of Rosaline Kaimbay, Executive Director of our Sierra Leone partner, CCET, the Center for Community Empowerment & Transformation. She’s using the same technique she used as the highly successful founding principal of a secondary school.
She’s brought the most qualified local teachers together to provide evening classes that complete and intensively review the school curriculum. 9th graders in schools without qualified teachers now get the chance to be fully prepared for their national proficiency exam.
75 of the 80 9th graders who started evening classes in January have continued and will soon be taking their national proficiency exam in late June. They also received computer training as part of the program. Gibril Bendu, above, an award winning local science teacher, has been leading the program.
The first group of nine 12th grade girls received four months of remedial classes before their final proficiency exam in April. CCET immediately engaged 11th graders to start the tutoring program. They plan to continue classes over the summer holiday.
Boys are invited and starting to join girls in the program. They need the chance to succeed, too.
Mrs. Kaimbay is focused on the success of the chiefdom’s teens.
Left, she finds the most disadvantaged girls like the one on the right, and tells them, come to school. If you can’t pay for a uniform, we will help you.
“I want to get results.”
That’s Mrs. Kaimbay, referring to the students passing the national exams. “And then I will be proud.”
Proud she should be. The tutoring program is among the best spent money in our organization’s five years, in terms of impact and number of students affected.
Since its January start, over 100 kids are getting help to assure their success at the most critical junctures in their education – making the transition to senior high and to higher education.
At about $50 per child, including computer training, this is high value. And it’s an investment that will continue to pay back through their future success and their impact on the chiefdom.
Mrs. Kaimbay is now ready to “camp” the 75 9th grade girls by turning the CCET building into a dormitory / classroom for 3 weeks before and during their proficiency exam.
The girls will live and sleep there 24/7, getting intensive prepping with sample test questions and keeping them focused & energized for their exam. All tutoring teachers participate. Mrs. Kaimbay will sleep there herself – on the concrete floor – as chaperone, coach and to supervise cooking to feed the students three meals a day.
With this technique, she got 100% of her former students passing the exam three years running. These girls are coming from other schools with more of an academic deficit. After 5 months of evening classes and with this last boost, Mrs. Kaimbay hopes to get 80% to 90% passes.
The diligence shown by everyone in the tutoring program has been impressive. It’s free to students and teachers get modest stipends. But I wondered if the commitment and enthusiasm for extra evening classes would be flagging now five months into the program.
It hasn’t. These girls are focused on succeeding and advancing their education. Their tutors look at the girls’ success as their own success.
Huge thanks go out to the Beaman Family for funding the tutoring program’s first 10 months and now stepping up to cover cost of feeding the girls for the three-week review camp.
We also send our deep thanks to everyone contributing to the scholarship program. It’s your support that brought them this far and gave them the opportunity to succeed.
I’m confident the girls will do us all proud. I can’t wait to see the next incoming senior high class in September filled with girls ready to continue learning.
CCET-SL grows orange, lime, grapefruit, African plum, cashew, avocado, guava and coconuts, all with seed they collect from locally purchased fruit.
CCET-SL grows some specialty trees like African plums, left.
Village beginning Aminata, left, is the youngest of 12 children. Her parents scratched together a living in the Rotifunk area. It’s typical of the chiefdom, with mud houses and where most earn a dollar or two a day as small traders at the weekly market. Her father was a primary school teacher, a low paying job, and her mother a trader. Now, her father is retired and her mother blind.
Proud college student Aminata, left, is now a first year student at the Institute of Public Administration and Management at the University of Sierra Leone in Freetown – thanks to Sherbro Foundation’s first college scholarship award of $1700, paying her first year’s tuition, fees, books, transportation and a stipend for living expenses.
“She is a woman, but she does [so much] good and all the people in the community admire her,” Aminata said. Rosaline shows girls a woman born in their chiefdom can get a college degree and take leadership roles usually filled by men.
Alima, left, is one student who signed up. We 
Thanks to a $5,000 Beaman Family Fund grant, the Tutoring Program is being offered free of charge to both girls and boys.
Paramount Chief Charles Caulker visited the first week and immediately called us in Cincinnati. We heard all the noise in the background of kids getting into the preloaded computer games, as their first effort in learning how to navigate a PC and use the mouse. He said it made him so proud.
Students don’t have textbooks and must copy limited notes teachers write on the blackboard.
Working to fill this gap is CCET-SL’s Tutoring Program, the brainchild of Managing Director Rosaline Kaimbay, left. As a former school principal, she ran year-end study camps where 9th graders had intensive all-day review classes for four weeks. The result was 100% of her students passed the junior high BECE completion exam, uncommon for any school, let alone a rural school.
Girls like Adama, left, feel pride that they’re joining a group of chiefdom academic elites, studying with the best local teachers in a first-class environment complete with solar light and computers.
It’s too far for them to walk home from school for their main (and sometimes only) daily meal and return again for evening classes. Some had not eaten since heading to school at 7 a.m.! And it’s too dark for girls to be walking home that distance at 7:30 p.m.
And special guests repeatedly said they’ve never heard of a larger – or more complete – scholarship program anywhere in the country. Ibrahim Coker, left, area supervisor of schools for the Sierra Leone Ministry of Education said: “I’ve never seen such a number of scholarships together with a total package including uniforms, exercise books and solar study lights.”
“It’s very impressive. I’ve never seen any organization giving so many awards and paying for so many things,” said Alice Conteh Morgan, left, managing director of Reliance Insurance Risk Co. in Freetown. Conteh Morgan, a Rotifunk native, attended to encourage the girls: “With your educations, you can achieve everything.”
The awards ceremony was covered by the Sierra Leone Broadcasting Co., the country’s only TV station and a regional radio station. Paramount Chief Charles Caulker said he continues to receive phone calls congratulating him on Bumpeh Chiefdom’s big news.
The biennial award goes to “the individual who has made a significant contribution to the human condition through their time, effort or expertise, whether this was a single event or a lifetime of work,” according to the organization. “This award is intended to recognize actions that go well beyond efforts in a single community or location and serve mankind as a whole.”
Arlene also thanked the P&G Alumni Foundation for their grant this year of $12,235 for CCET-Sierra Leone’s new education and computer center in Rotifunk. The money went to finish equipping the center, including 17 more laptop computers and a color printer for the first and only printing service in a district of 300,000 people.
Sierra Leone is highly rural. Most live in small, hard to access villages, where there is no government birth registration.
The chiefdom cooperates with the government to collect information needed to secure government birth certificates for newborns.
Uniforms are being sewn locally.
The solar lights we sent were 
The picture Daniel sent of Hawanatu shows her with a plaintive look on her face and a T-shirt emblazoned with “School” across her chest. People buy discarded used clothes from piles sold in the market, and I thought her choice was not coincidental.
Hawanatu’s husband, an “unqualified” primary school teacher, didn’t complete high school. He has the opportunity now to get basic teacher training, but it means he’ll be away from home and can’t support his family.
Sherbro Foundation 