Villagers dig deep to fill education gap

Pubudu Pre-School in Sri Lanka, built with Room to Read money and local labour

The women of the construction committee, grandmothers all, are gathered by the entrance of the newly built pre-school, an arch of freshly cut coconut branch marking the threshold to the immaculate school grounds.

“I carried stones to the workmen and brought water by bucket from the hand pump,” calls out one woman. “We dug the foundations,” says another, pointing to a group of her friends stood in an excited huddle. “We helped mix the cement and carried it to where the builders were working,” shouts out a third.

The object of the women’s pride is the Pubudu Pre-School in the central Matale District of Sri Lanka, where toddlers are busy careering on a roundabout and showing off their latest drawings. Opened in October on the grounds of a Buddhist temple, the freshly painted school is a riot of yellows, blues and greens, topped with a neatly tiled red roof. Though the building is small and simple, the building has a solid feel.

That was not how it was before October, when the only pre-school within miles was housed in a shed once used to store tobacco. “That’s when they called a meeting of parents and well-wishers of the village, and the priest also came,” says Glenfrey De Mel, country director of Room to Read, a charity that builds schools and libraries and funds girls’ scholarships in the developing world.

The 12-person committee formed by the villagers applied for one of the San Francisco-based charity’s so-called Challenge Grants, so named because Room to Read will only work with communities prepared to contribute to projects it supports. It uses the term “co-invest”.

In the case of the Pubudu Pre-School, the cost of the building, whose construction was overseen by an engineer provided by the charity, was calculated at Rs1.65m ($14,500, €9,700, £8,800). The villagers were challenged to contribute Rs250,000, or 15 per cent. The two then signed a “contract” – though no lawyers were involved – in which the village construction committee was named as “the party of the second part” and the charity as the “party of the first part”. The document, listing the obligations of the community to build and maintain the school, runs to 14 pages.

The villagers, though better off than some of the impoverished communities with which the charity works in Cambodia, Vietnam and, more recently, in Zambia, lacked the wherewithal to raise much cash. Instead, they fulfilled their part of the bargain through labour, calculated at a nominal rate Rs75 an hour. The hours worked are logged in a notebook, evidently meant for a child, which has a picture of “super trucks” on the cover.

Villagers can also contribute building materials. In Trincomalee, on Sri Lanka’s east coast, community leaders persuaded local police to allow them to cut trees from a nearby forest for construction of a Room to Read library. “It was a good cause so they turned a blind eye,” explains one of the villagers.

The Pubudu school fills a gap because the Sri Lankan government does not put much emphasis on pre-school education. The state does not pay for pre-school teachers, so the community has to do that too, levying a small contribution from each parent. D.M. Inoka Jayatilaka, the head teacher, receives about Rs5,000 a month.

“I have a degree so this is not enough at all. But I love teaching, especially in pre-school she says. “Now I am especially happy because of the new facilities.”

In other countries, such as Nepal, the charity’s building programme helps fill even more basic shortfalls in the provision of primary and secondary education. Schools are so sparse that children often have to walk hours to class, books balanced on their head. In the Shree Sarada Lower Secondary School, in Bardiya, western Nepal, children are jammed into classes of up to 80 on benches that also serve as desks.

“This building is very old. It is useless. Its time is over,” says Tripti Chaudhary, a Room to Read field officer in Nepal, pointing to the shabby concrete structure with a (leaky) corrugated iron roof. In the new classrooms, to which parents are contributing 40 per cent of the cost, there will be a reading area with books in the corner of each room. There will also be an indoor toilet.

When it is finished, a plaque will be erected saying that the community has built the school with Room to Read’s support. “We always name it after the local community,” says John Wood, the charity’s founder, “because we want them to feel ownership.”

To make a donation go to www.roomtoread.org/ft