By Vincent Gunde
The Advancing Girls Education in Africa (AGE Africa) is implementing the Malawi end-to end program in Dowa district with a mission to create life-changing opportunities to young women through initiatives in Education, Mentorship and Leadership Development.
AGE Africa is currently working in 9 districts in Malawi which are Dowa, Ntchisi, Mchinji, Kasungu, Balaka, Mangochi, Machinga, Zomba and Mulanje and in Dowa.
It is in 6 feeder primary schools and 9 secondary schools.
The organization provides scholarships which are awarded on an individual basis,of which each scholarship award is up to 4 years, if the scholarship recipient meets AGE Africa’s continued eligibility requirements.
Giving updates of the program, AGE Africa’s District Coordinator for Dowa Chauncy Kasenye, said scholarship payments are paid directly to the Ministry of Education on behalf of the scholarship recipient saying school materials, toiletries, small stipends are given directly to the scholarship recipient at the beginning of each school term.
Kasenye said among the scholarship conditions, secondary school students must be from feeder primary schools, needy and well performing in class while tertiary beneficiaries must also be needy and from partner schools.
She said the program is meeting some challenges in Dowa as most of the students complain of difficulties in English, inadequate learning materials in Community Day Secondary Schools and poor boarding facilities for self-boarding schools.
The district coordinator said the project is being implemented with the main objective of contributing to the development of the future leaders of Malawi by providing an end-to -end educational support for the children in the tobacco farming communities.
“The program will improve access to post-secondary education, knowledge in Sexual Reproduction and Health (SRH) and gender enhance leadership skills, joint monitoring visits to schools and psychosocial support training, among others,” said Kasenye.
She said an action research was conducted by AGE Africa in Dowa, Mchinji and Kasungu so to enhance Scholarship Beneficiary Selection, process for identifying needy students with high academic potential saying the findings have proved that the current selection process was effective in identifying needy students and not students with high academic performance potential.
In her remarks, Dowa District Council’s Director of Planning and Development Mercy Mpakule, thanked AGE Africa for being so exemplary in providing project progress reports to Dec advising all partners in the district to emulate the example set.
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