Project Zambia

Project Zambia is a partnership between the University of St Andrews and the Zambian Non-Government Organisation, Sport In Action.

The project involves University staff and students living and working for 6 weeks each summer in a rural Zambian village to help staff and pupils at the local School, and the wider village community, with literacy skills. The Project is co-ordinated by the University’s Student Services and in recent years has focused on the village of Kazemba in Chongwe Province.

The Team Leaders for PZ2016, Sam Lister (Registry) and Cat Wilson (CAPOD), provide an update on the Project ahead of their trip this summer.

“We are in the final stages of preparing to travel to Zambia in June and July, and would like to thank the St Andrews community for all of the help and support over the last few months. We have almost reached our fundraising target of £5000 thanks to the generosity of staff, students, friends and our partner school, Lawhead Primary.

While much of our fundraising has come from direct donations, we hosted a staff quiz this semester and have been running a Coppers for Zambia project with a number of Schools and Units, both of which were very successful. We are still welcoming donations via our Fundrazr page until Monday 6 June.

We are each spending three weeks in Kazemba, while our student team will spend the full six weeks in the village. We first visited Kazemba with Ruth Unsworth, Assistant Director of Student Services, last November and although we were only there for three days, Zambia left a lasting impression on us.

We received an extremely warm welcome in Kazemba, a rural village where approximately half of the 300 school children are identified as vulnerable and single or double orphans. Children stay at the village school until Grade 9 (age 15), and may then continue their education at a boarding school in Chongwe, provided they pass their exams and have the funds to do so. The school has no electricity, and very limited resources with which to teach the national curriculum.

In partnership with the teachers, we identified five fundraising priorities for PZ2016:

• new batteries for the school’s solar panels;
• laptops to facilitate teaching of Computer Studies, part of the core curriculum;
• vital repairs to school roof (completed during our November visit);
• mobile science labs;
• and high school sponsorship.

For more information on project priorities, please see the Project Zambia pages of the University website.