Building a Future

The story so far...

As you may have seen from the above video, the girls in this area have been facing a future with little or no access to education beyond primary school.There continues to be a prevalence of early pregnancies and the traditional practice of child marriage. 

The area is so remote that most NGOs have found it very difficult to deliver help to the people. 

The Livingstone Initiative has stepped in to help and has so far raised over GBP 142,000 from the UK. The school has been given almost 750 hectares of land. The first building – a girls’ hostel – is completed and an ablution block with running water and sewarage almost finished. A borehole has been drilled and water storage tanks erected. Boreholes are the main source of water in the area and this first borehole replaced the only well, which was very small, very deep and very muddy. 

We have had amazing support both from within Zambia and from the UK.

In 2011, the then Headmistress of St Mary's School, Calne, in the UK said to us: "We don't just want to fundraise, we want to bring a group of senior girls out to Zambia to help to build the school" Wow!. They did just that. They gave up their autumn half-term in 2013, and came out to Chama and worked hard - very, very hard in the October heat. By the time they left, they had completed the first building and almost completed an ablution block as well as experiencing a completely different culture and way of life. They had entertained the villagers with their attempts at cultural dancing the Zambian way and introduced the locals to "pop" dancing. They laughed and played football with the children and came home with wonderful stories about their amazing experience in Africa and a wealth of memories – memories which will last a lifetime.

In 2013, The Bishop of Edinburgh, The Rt Rev Dr John Armes, wrote to us to say they would like to include The Anglican Children's Programme in their 2013 Lent Appeal and they raised a huge amount of funding which went direct to the school project up in Chama. For those of you who don't know, the Episcopal Cathedral in Edinburgh is also called St Mary's and with two such major contributors to the Project bearing the same name, the Bishop of Eastern Zambia decided that the new school in Chama must also be called St Mary's – St Mary's Anglican Secondary School for Girls Chama. 

This year, in 2019, we welcomed a small group of volunteers from The Grassmarket Community Project furniture division, who came out to help in September of that year. They spent three weeks helping the community to raise the roof on the large girls' hostel and add the finishing touches, making door and wiindow frames.

We are looking for donations, offers of expertise, sponsorship, and partnerships to help build this school and open it. The new school will ultimately provide a safe environment and education for 1000-1500 vulnerable girls and orphans, but there is much still to do. 

The school is now almost ready to open to the first intake of girls in Grade 8. The school will then be completed in yearly stages. We therefore need your help to:

• Drill and line more boreholes
• Construct further classrooms, more dormitories and ablution blocks
• Install solar lighting
• Undertake a hydrology report on the agricultural land and then plan how best to use the land for grazing, growing and harvesting produce and planting trees.
  
• Build a science laboratory
• Obtain equipment for the school, such as library books, pencils blackboards, desks, chairs, etc.
• Develop and improve agriculture and in order to give girls life skills for the future. The sale of produce grown on the land owned by the school will help sustain the school.
• Improve healthcare for the school and the community.

The Zambian Government is helping, too...

• It has built the first tarred road into the district, which gives access to the villages for the first time during the rains and has dramatically improved supply logistics.
  
• They have opened a small general hospital in Chama boma (the district HQ) and opened a small clinic staffed by nurses in Tembwe. There are plans to enlarge the clinic to a medical centre in Tembwe.
  
• The Ministry of Education have agreed to supply teaching staff, provide staff housing and pay staff wages.
• COMACO, a conservation agriculture company, are also helping the small-scale local farmers with their rice production and we are looking for ways to find new markets for this crop, to help boost the local economy.
• The community are making all the bricks from river sand and water and supplying manual labour for free and other help has been supplied, bringing down the overall costs of the school.

Children are Zambia’s future and, by building this first secondary school for girls, these children will go on to have a real choice in life, which in turn will bring benefits to generations to come.

Your support would be much valued in helping to bring about this change for the better in this far-flung community. We would be happy to hear from you if you would like to discuss any aspect of the school in more detail, and if you would like to contribute. 

Please contact  This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.for further information. 
Please help us to make this school possible.

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