The impact of school closures due to Covid-19 meant that many schools in Uganda struggled from the loss of school fees and were forced to close permanently. PEAS Horizon and PEAS Town View High School were two schools that Leo Lion Foundation (formerly COINS Foundation) supported PEAS to acquire, ensuring that their 326 students were able to continue their education. Had the schools closed, students would have had to travel long distances to access other schools, with many likely to drop out entirely.
This marked the first time that PEAS had bought existing schools. Where previously schools had been built from scratch, it made sense to utilise the existing buildings, but PEAS were quick to implement their own stamp, ensuring that students received a quality and affordable standard of education in line with their existing network. Both schools are in relatively poor districts and low-income communities. Since opening at the beginning of 2022, PEAS Horizon has flourished. Having started with 178 students, following investment in the facilities at PEAS Horizon, numbers have tripled to 617 students today, meanwhile PEAS Town View hasn’t yet enjoyed the same success, struggling to enrol students in this poor community.
For Town View to become a successful, thriving school it needs the buildings and facilities in place to attract new students and facilitate a quality education. We are pleased to be partnering with PEAS to change this as part of a three-year turn around project. The funding will support the building and furnishing of a girls’ dormitory with a sanitary block, install solar power as well as the construction of a motorized borehole. Boarding accommodation allows the students to be on site for longer with higher safety, better lighting, more nutritious meals and more access to teachers and textbooks. Boarding students have higher chances to concentrate on their studies and the income generated from boarding fees is also vital in ensuring the school can run sustainably in the long-term. At Town View, there is very little available land, which makes expansion difficult and poses a challenge to the growth of the school, which is necessary to educate the hundreds of students in the area looking to attend secondary school. As such, a storied dormitory will be built, initially starting with the ground floor which will accommodate 120 girls. Currently, Town View has no proper boarding accommodation which severely restricts the number of students PEAS can educate so this leaves scope to build additional floors as demand requires.
Accompanying the dormitory with be a new sanitary block to have a healthy ratio of toilets to students and avoid overloading the existing facilities, ensuring there is scope for the school to take on the additional students safely. Solar power now accompanies all of PEAS new builds to provide sustainable, cheap, and climate friendly power to light dormitories. Providing light in the students sleeping quarters enhances the safety and wellbeing of the students and means they also have additional time to read and study. Finally, a motorised borehole will be constructed as currently there is only one major water point serving all 231 students, which is a safety hazard for the school and causes long waiting times for students. As this is already something that is required, it is even more critical to accommodate for the additional students that will join following the addition of the girls’ dormitory.
The additional infrastructure will radically improve the quality of education provision, both in terms of academic outcomes but also wider safety and wellbeing of students, setting the school up for future growth.
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