Classroom furniture and water pump for Mampong Muslim School

Rationale and planning

Mampong Muslim Mission school was established by the community in September 2003, and adopted by the education authority. It has 154 students in 6 classrooms, and 20 teachers. It’s a thriving school with happy pupils and dedicated teachers. I met with headteacher SISulaiman Issah and several other teachers there.

The school’s main ask of Turbo Ghana is for schoolroom furniture. They have about 26 desks to share among the 150 students. At the moment they are borrowing furniture from an Arabic Saturday school; students have to carry the furniture each week to and from the school.

About 10 years ago the school had mains piped water, but it got cut off because the school couldn’t pay the bill. This is a typical situation in Ghana: schools have no money. Teachers are paid directly by the government, and there’s simply no budget for the day-to-day running of the school. A Turkish NGO gave them a borehole (water well) in 2020, which worked for a while, but the pump has broken on it. Their student toilet is also spoiled; the concrete base broke and fell in. Now the students use the teachers’ toilet, and the teachers use the toilet of a nearby private house.

What we propose

We want to buy the school furniture. It will consist of 100 desks, which we can source at 350 GHC each, totalling 35,000 GHC, which is about £2500.

We asked them why they had no system for collecting money for the water; if they had had that, they would have funds to pay for a new pump. If each child’s parents contribute 2 cedis per term, they can collect 154 x 3 x 2 = 1000 cedis per year. If they also sell water to the local community, they could triple that amount. We want to buy a new borehole pump for the school, and help them set up a system where they can collect contributions from the parents, and sell water to the community. This will provide a small revenue stream for paying other day-to-day costs for the school, such as paper, chalk, etc. The cost for the pump is about £500.

If funds allow, we will also renovate the student toilets, at a cost of £1000. This brings the budget to £4000.