LearnAsOne

Yesterday I visited the third NGO, the Butterfly Tree, which is a small organisation with registered offices in both Zambia and the UK. I was invited to visit Mukuni Village by Jane Kaye-Bailey, who founded the organisation, to see the work that has already taken place and also hear from the community what they still need.

Mukuni Village is one of the largest villages in Zambia with a population of around 7,000. It’s just 7kms from Victoria Falls and is a popular destination for tourists day trips. The Village is part of the Mukuni Chiefdom (think district in the UK) which has a total of 12 schools for around 15,000 people. A High School is currently being built in the Village, but some of the surrounding villages have far more basic facilities with just three or four classrooms for grades 1-7 (primary school).

I met with Martin and Mupotola who showed me some of the classrooms, pit latrines and teacher’s houses in the Village itself. They follow standard plans drawn up by the government so any structures built in the satellite schools would be almost identical.

A recently built classroom block in Mukuni Village

I was then taken through the accounts, cash book and a full breakdown of costs for the latest building to have been constructed. The level of transparency was very impressive and I didn’t even have to ask to see it, they wanted to show me. Mupotola also connected a laptop up to the Internet via a USB dongle and it was easy to send a tweet and an email so communication would be no problem at all.

The schools in Mukuni are currently on holiday (they start again on Monday) so I didn’t get to meet any of the children, but I didn’t really need to. I was told the greatest need is at Siamasimbi school which is about 30kms from the Village and has just three classrooms for seven grades.

So that’s another day run, and another good project seen. I was particularly impressed with the level of transparency which is what the LearnAsOne idea is all about. It leaves me with one more NGO to see and then a hard decision to make.

How will the decision be made?

Now that I find myself in the fortunate position of having met three good NGOs it comes down to a few factors. Who is the most transparent? Who is easiest to communicate with? Who has the most experience? What scale can we achieve with a single NGO if our fundraising is successful. And what type of schools do we initially want to work with? Very basic, partly built, or High School.

I’m continually mulling all of this over with the trustees and a decision will be made tomorrow night or on Saturday. The volunteer documenting team is due to join me on Sunday and we’ll all travel to the first project on the Monday.