Students of the Nguabu School in Sierra Leone supported by West Springfield Rotary Club project. Photo contributed
Rotary International has awarded a $101,000 grant to the Rotary Clubs of West Springfield (with members from Burke, Fairfax Station and Springfield), Gainesville-Haymarket and Caroline County, Va. and Bo, Sierra Leone to support three primary schools in remote villages in that West African nation. The assistance to the schools will result in significant, sustained improvements in their ability to provide the necessary primary education and in turn drive long term positive impacts for their local communities.
The grant will enable the Rotary Clubs to install latrines and solar electricity systems in each school and send three teachers from each school to Njala University for training and certification. Another major element is health and sanitation training.
During this three-year project, the Rotary clubs will be working with the three villages to ensure they develop local funding sources and implement practices to sustain schools into the future. In addition to requiring that that the project be sustainable, RI grants require extensive project monitoring to measure success against well-defined metrics. The service project progress will be regularly updated on the Rotary Club of West Springfield Facebook site devoted to this project: https://www.facebook.com/WSRCSierraLeoneProject