2011 has been an exciting and eventful year for all of us connected with the Zambezi International Green School especially as we are now a tangible reality having opened our doors to our first pupils in September. We now look forward to the New Year and hope and pray that we grow from strength to strength.
It was in July that we found the perfect building for the first stage of our project. Within six weeks we transformed the building from an empty shell to a vibrant centre of learning. This was largely due to the hard work and dedication of our amazing staff.
We opened at a difficult time given that September sees the start of the third term in Zambian schools and many parents are reluctant to move their children to a new school at such a time in the academic year. However, despite this we managed to recruit sixteen pupils into our Early Childhood Learning Centre. From small acorns grow great oak trees and even in its one term of operation Zambezi International Green School has established itself as the beacon school across the City of Livingstone.
Despite the tremendous success of our Early Years Learning Centre 2011 ended on a sad note with the untimely passing of Mr David Khomonyane - the Headman we have worked so closely with over the past few years. Mr Khomonyane left behind a widow and six children. We hope that the success of our school and especially the Kazungula campus will be a fitting memorial to our friend and colleague.
As 2012 begins our focus is very much on growth and development. We are currently recruiting pupils for our Early Learning Centre and Grades 1, 2, 3 and 4 at our Flamboyant Lane campus whilst actively seeking an additional building in order to provide for students in Grades 5, 6, 7 and 8 from this time next year. This strategy enables us to continue to grow as a centre of educational excellence and to generate income to invest in the future vision for ZIGS which as our purpose built green school on the banks of the Zambezi.
With our student numbers growing we are in a position to bring on board new members of our team. Depending upon the exact number of pupils enrolling for the new academic year we hope to employ four or five new members of the teaching staff. This will ensure that we meet our promise to parents that all classes will be small with an excellent teacher : pupil ratio. Furthermore, everyone working as a teacher at ZIGS will be qualified as a teacher. Unlike many other private schools in Zambia we will not employ non qualified staff to work in classrooms alongside teachers. We are committed to exemplary standards. One our new teachers’ joining us in January is Mr Aqeel Ahmad – a Mathematics specialist from Pakistan. Aqeel has won prizes for the teaching of Maths in his own country and will be a wonderful addition to the ZIGS increasingly international team of staff and students!
Happy New Year from all at ZIGS!
Posts
I recently came across this article about CAFOD (the Catholic Agency For Overseas Development). It was posted as a reply to an article in the Telegraph.
'CAFOD spends £49m a year, of which £6m on political campaigns in the UK. I would like to see charities required by law to devote their resources to charitable works, not politics. Of the £49m a year it spends, £13m is on salaries and pensions for its UK staff. Those
salaries average more than £35K a year. While not a fortune from a middle-class perspective, this is an average, and one that is well above the average salary in the UK as a whole, raising questions over whether the charity is being run in the interests of its employees.
Donors may not realise that much of the money they donate is going on salaries and pensions, and only once those are covered will anything at all be left over for charitable works. CAFOD spends £1.5m a year on professional consultancy fees. The director of CAFOD pays himself £76,892 a year, plus a further £7,689 in pension contributions for himself. Once again, there are plenty of people on six-figure salaries in the UK who might view that salary as unremarkable, but this is meant to be the “voluntary sector”. In fact, the CAFOD director’s salary is an increase from £71258 in 2008. You might ask why such a large salary increase is justified in the voluntary sector in a year with little inflation. I expect the current disaster in Haiti will
produce further salary increases for the CAFOD director this year. CAFOD admits it spends £6m a year on politics and £6m a year on fundraising, and is happy to quote in its annual accounts a figure showing the balance of £37m is devoted to its “international campaigns”, but simply maths shows that the salaries of many of its UK staff are being rolled into that, and that the real frontline spending figure is much lower. Actually once £7m in “operating costs” and £2m in “support costs” are deducted, only £28m of CAFOD’s annual income of £49m is given in grants under its international programme. Charitable donors may be surprised that this is so low as a proportion of the whole. While £13m of this £28m is devoted to disaster relief grants
and £6.7m to sustainable livelihoods, people may be surprised that some of the grants are for yet more political work in foreign countries. £1.7m of the grants was for “economic advocacy” and £1.4m was for “human rights” and £1.2m was for “conflict resolution”. While
CAFOD does do charitable works, the real frontline work of the organisation in genuine charitable and non-political fields amounts to about half of the organisation’s expenditure…
I regard most of the charitable sector in the UK as a vast scam. It may be legal what they do, but in my eyes these charities are run in the interests of their UK employees, and in fact could be seen, morally, if not legally, as embezzling charitable donations to spend on themselves. There needs to be legal maximum that charity workers can spend on themselves, and that needs to be below the national average wage. Eg: a max of £20K a year with no pension contributions or “expenses”, whether for the directors or anyone else. There needs to be much more pro bono work for charities and much less creaming off donations into personal bank accounts. By reducing salaries to £20K a year and deleting political campaigning in the UK and political work in the third world, CAFOD would save £17m, producing a 70% increase in the funds available for real frontline work on disaster relief and sustainable livelihoods. Now why do I think that’s NOT going to happen…'
None of this surprises me given the institutionalised nature of the large UK charities.