Rebuilding A Schooling System

With most schools in rural areas facing abject poverty, overcrowding, lack of resources and facilities, the cry for help is loud and desperate. Rural children want to compete on an equal footing with their urban brothers and sisters.

Anglo American South Africa has answered this call with its Rural Schools Programme aimed at ameliorating the situation in Limpopo.

The programme has helped rural schools in the province to build proper classrooms and school facilities, which has made a difference to the lives of thousands of children. It was started by Anglo American in 1975 to provide support for classroom building in rural communities and to address the problems facing rural education.

The programme is a good example of the type of projects the mining giant's Chairman's Fund supports. The fund is a dedicated instrument through which Anglo American channels its social investment in South Africa and is constantly rated as one of the country's top corporate social investment vehicles. The fund has a budget of R54-million a year.

In 2006 the Chairman's Fund invested 36% of its budget in education, of which the Rural Schools Programme received a hefty chunk.
With the Limpopo education department the fund formed a three-year, R30-million public-private partnership in 2003 to provide additional classrooms and basic facilities for the rural schools in the Sekhukhune district. The partnership is the largest private project in South Africa for the development of education.

"Sekhukune was selected specifically as an area of strategic importance to Anglo Platinum," says Paul Pereira, communications manager of Tshikululu Social Investments, who manages the fund. He says the framework of the partnership not only looks at the infrastructural backlog objectives of the intervention, but includes teacher development and maths and science advancement.

He says the provincial department of education was understandably under enormous pressure to decrease the number of schools where children were taught under trees or in mud structures. The fund has tried to help fill that need.

The programme was rewarded for its work by winning the Investing in Education award at this year's Investing in the Future Awards. The judges were impressed with the fund's commitment to supporting development initiatives directed towards the alleviation of poverty, the upliftment of the general community and its commitment to alleviate the problem of overcrowding facing many rural schools.

To read more visit Mail & Guardian www.mg.co.za

Also visit Anglo American at www.angloamerican.com