season's greetings

We thank everyone who helped us bring free upper secondary online education to vulnerable school dropouts, especially our volunteers, who are creating engaging student driven online education or help in operations, our staff and coaches in Zimbabwe and our partners. What none of us could achieve on their own, is being achieved as we join forces.

Looking back at 2023 we have improved our methodology and put a strong focus on interdisciplinary projects that allow students to come up with problem solving strategies, creative entrepreneurship ideas and focus on ICT. It should also allow our local centres a certain financial independence.

ICT and infrastructure

Thanks to device donations from schools, we now have an excellent ratio of 2 to 3 students per laptop or tablet. As students also have to do offline tasks and some have their own devices this is alongside of installing solar and getting faster wifi has allowed us to create a most conducive learning environment to focus on our goal to give students a high level of digital and computer skills to become the employees and entrepreneurs of the future.

In October Conium Nyathi our Head of Countries visited Switzerland and amongst others the secondary school Ebni in Neftenbach, which had donated laptops to our centres in Zimbabwe and were impressed by the student centred learning they practiced and that had won them an award.

We visited different current and prospect partners, and paid a courtesy visit to ITU to meet Dr Cosmas Zavazava who warmly welcomed us.

We were very welcome at our visit at FIBL meeting with Gian Nikolay and his team who gave us a lot of insight about composting, agroforestry and bio char. Other partnerships we are building or have established are especially in the educational field as we hope to build learning partnerships to integrate existing learning contents from our partners to create a high quality learning environment.

Identifying local challenges and suggesting solutions through education

Our method is to identify local challenges and show students how thanks to education they can find simple, practical solutions:

1) High levels of youth unemployment. While the students have little influence in more jobs being created, as entrepreneurs they create their own income.

2) Insufficient waste management, especially organic and plastic waste, which leads to waste dumping causing animals to attack the waste and sometimes die, smells and spreading diseases as well as good soil material being lost.

Our solutions are to integrate composting, bokashi and solid shampoo production into our semester assignments.

3) Food insecurity. As part of the composting projects, students have their small horticulture project, in which they grow herbs, salads and vegetables, which sell well and will buy them food.

4) Lack of funds for hygiene products. By creating their own sustainable products, they can safe funds as well es make it into a business.

5) Long interruptions to electricity supplies. We plan to partner with companies for sustainable energy and hot water production.

sustainable entrepreneurship

These semester projects include learning about the economic benefit of sustainable waste management, as it leads to reducing organic waste by using it for soil improvement through composting and bokashi or reducing plastic waste and creating a business with solid cosmetics.

Celebration in Zimbabwe

On 1 August we celebrated Swiss Zimbabwean collaboration in Victoria Falls Zimbabwe with speeches, music and dancing.

Outlook

Our focus in the next year will be on creating more high level educational contents and making our entrepreneurial projects into success not just for our students. It will be on collaboration with schools and educational institutes and on raising enough funds to be able to give learning to more students as demand is high. We thank everyone for your support and wish you a wonderful festive season with room for contemplation and happy moments with your loved ones.