What is provided through the School Adoption Program?
     
     Your adoption of a school in Africa will not only provide the hope and encouragement that someone cares, it will also provide very real help to teachers and children. Your money will provide:

Opportunities for Orphans to Attend School
While primary school is supposed to be free, many schools are forced to require fees to provide basic educational materials. Your support will allow school to really be free, especially for those children who have been orphaned by HIV/AIDS and other causes. This decreases the burden felt by families who take in orphans, and increases the likelihood of more families doing the same.

Additional Teachers
Many schools are only staffed with one teacher for every two classes. Students work under their own supervision while their teacher teaches another class. Your support will help to hire new teachers to allow more personal attention for each child.

Capital Development
Many schools do not have enough classrooms for each class. Many schools in remote areas have no housing available for teachers, so the teachers transfer. Solar power for lighting in rural schools enables children who board or who live nearby to study into the evening. Boarding facilities allow students to study longer. They also reduce the impact of walking as many as 15 miles round trip to attend school and the demands of household duties.

Fencing keeps wild animals out of school grounds. Rain water harvesting allows schools to collect water for students and teachers, who otherwise would have to walk as many as 15 miles round trip to fetch water. These are just some of the things your support will help provide.

Educational Materials
Your support will ensure that each child has paper, a pen to work with, and a subject workbook for every 3 students. It will ensure that each teacher has a manual for each subject and level they are teaching and provide chalk and lab materials.

Teacher Training
Your support will help us to train the teachers at your school in HIV/AIDS and how to teach children about the disease. We will also provide training in Christian Religious Education, a testable subject in most areas. In addition, it will help us, in cooperation with the government education ministry, to provide training in all the other subjects.

Discipleship
This program includes the discipleship of teachers and students. AfricaHope will work with the school and the local church to provide discipleship for each Christian teacher and to provide excellent training during weekly chapel services. Our goal in this is to help teachers and students become more loving, avoid HIV/AIDS through abstinence until marriage and marital faithfulness, and to encourage them to become catalysts of positive change in their communities.

Teacher Encouragement
Teachers who are assigned to rural schools are often not from rural areas. They find themselves teaching at schools where:

-they have to walk up to 15 miles round-trip to get water
- they may meet no one who speaks the national language
-they can’t buy bread, rice, or many other staple foods
-they have to spend half of their paycheck in getting to town to collect their paycheck.

All of these pressures make it hard for teachers to focus on their heart for teaching children. Your support will help with transportation to pick up paychecks and to shop for food. Your support will also provide some small incentives for teachers to do their job well. It only takes a little encouragement to help these teachers’ natural desires to serve and teach remain strong.

Community Involvement
In the long run, it is the community itself that must take ownership of their school. Your support will help AfricaHope staff to visit the community on a regular basis to encourage community involvement in the school. Communities will be expected to share costs with you, donating their time, money, and gifts in kind for the sake of their children.