THE SOS Herman Gmeiner International College in Tema has donated an amount of GH¢2,500 to the Mampong-Akuapem Development Association (MAKAD) in support of the association’s community educational support programme.
The donation, which forms part of the school’s Learning Links Project under its Creativity Action and Service (CAS) programme instituted some 20years ago, was to help pupils and students in deprived communities have access to learning materials aimed at improving education in their communities.
The principal of the college, Mr Israel Titi Ofei, who presented the money to the association’s board, indicated that the project, since its inception, had given students of the college an opportunity to appreciate the problems of the less-fortunate in society.
This problem identification, according to him, had witnessed students developing the spirit of selflessness and empathy to put what they learnt into practice.
The learning links programme is an educational intervention aimed at offering children in the targeted communities access to reading materials through the provision of libraries stocked with books and other reading materials to help improve children’s reading abilities.
He challenged members of the association to develop mechanisms aimed at monitoring pupils’ attendance at the library all year round as the college was putting in place measures aimed at motivating pupils who had made considerable use of the facility through borrowing and reading of materials.
The Board Chairman of MAKAD, Mr Reindorf Perbi, who received the money on behalf of the association, expressed profound appreciation to the college for the gesture.
He indicated that the group’s association with the college had seen tremendous improvement in the education of children in the community.
Mr Perbi regretted that little attention was being given to the education sector although the country’s development depended heavily on the building of capacity of its human resource base through effective teaching and learning.
“It is sad to note that corporate institutions preferred sponsoring entertainment events like beauty pageants and football, while many schoolchildren who would take up the mantle of managing the economy tomorrow still learnt under trees across the country,” he lamented.
He paid tribute to Mr Henry Djabanor, the CAS co-ordinator of the school, for the initiative and promised that the money would be put to judicious use.
Mr Perbi appealed for more support for the project initiated by the college, calling on stakeholders and institutional bodies to develop quota systems towards the support of educational outreach projects.
Students of the college also volunteered to develop a database for the association to help them capture data meant for monitoring the attendance of pupils and students to the library.
The SOS Herman Gmeiner College, founded as a secondary department of the SOS schools, was founded in 1990 by the SOS Kinderdorf International, a world-wide charitable organisation, to provide family life education for orphans and destitutes in the SOS villages.
The college, since its inception, has engaged in outreach programmes in deprived communities through the establishment of creativity action and service centres to enhance early childhood development of pupils who missed out on education owing to extreme poverty.
Over the years, the CAS programme has also provided drinking water and school blocks for communities such as Kakasunaka No.1 in the Tema metropolis, Dedenya in the Dangme East District in the Greater Accra Region and Aklamador in the Volta Region.
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