Support Kinamba Nursery!

Kinamba Nursery looks up and out at the central business district of Kigali; gleaming financial towers and offices look down and over at a poor, neglected part of the city, mainly dirt road, and buildings on a significantly less grand scale.
The Nursery was started over a year ago by an enterprising and dedicated local man called Evariste. His spur was that the majority of the children in Kinamba had no access to education, for some very simple reasons: school costs too much (even though school fees were abolished in Rwanda around 2003, parents must pay costs such as a notebook and pen and uniform for their child: an annual $10 makes it prohibitive); and the parents of prospective pupils have more pressing things to worry about than sending the little one to learn. Many of the mothers of the nursery’s children are prostitutes, many are single parents, most have difficulty earning enough to feed and house the family.

Evariste started teaching pre-school kids out of a disused room on Kinamba hill. Lessons were basic at the beginning with no materials and a restricted curriculum, but hope arrived in the form of Meg, a former VSO who, fortunately for the nursery, lived next door and was willing to help.
Since the beginning of that partnership, the Kinamba Nursery (also known as, somewhat to Meg’s embarrassment, the Meg Foundation School) has gone from strength to strength. They moved house, started looking for funding, found some remarkable yellow and blue uniforms available en masse locally and cheaply, searched for more funding, put together a pre-school curriculum and supplemented it with teaching tools and early years development materials, and guess what? The word spread, the good news got around, and the kids kept coming.
There are now over 100 children at the Kinamba Nursery. Education is completely free, and many of the children are getting the highest marks in the district for primary level education. Every morning the children arrive to a breakfast of bread and cereal (where otherwise they may not eat – this is a great incentive to get the mums to send their otherwise potentially useful children to school!) and 4 hours of lessons. In the afternoon it is their mums’ turn, the school becomes a workshop for income generating activities, an attempt to wean these women off the evils of prostitution. The mums, many of them in the same yellow and blue as their kids, learn hair-dressing, weaving, jewellery-making, and some English too. The feeling of hope of a better future is everywhere.