Tawina CBCC, Pensulo Village
No. of Students: 98 kids
School Feeding Start Date: 22nd August 2016

The Tawina Community Based Children’s Centre is located in a village called Kananji in the T/A (Traditional Authority) of Kuntaja. It is a distance of 24 kms across rough track from the Seibo offices at the Beehive in Chilomoni. Established in 2012 Tawina is unusual in that it is an entirely community driven project and is run by a committee of 10 people picked from the community. From a pool of 4 care-giver volunteers each week 2 volunteers care for over 90 children.

Care-Givers
None of the care-giver volunteers have had any formal ECD (Early-Years Childcare Development) Training but all have completed primary school.

Nursery Building

The nursery building consists of two rooms with an iron sheet roof. The iron sheets and cement used for construction were donated by the Vanzara brothers of Blantyre who were aware of the community’s needs.
The community provided the blocks, the building labour and the land. Currently the nursery is without doors and the inside walls need to be plastered.

A Typical Day

A typical day at Tawina begins at 8am and ends at 11am. The school meal is served at approx. 10:30 am and volunteer-cooks from the community usually assist. Most volunteer-cooks either have children attending the nursery or bring their own kids for school feeding.

Outdoor Toilet & Water Source

The community built an outdoor thatched toilet but it is unusable during the rainy season. In order to have enough water to cook the school meal women have to wake from 1am to start drawing water from a well. In the event the well is empty they have to walk approx. 45 minutes to draw water from a borehole.

Community Spirit
When the nursery opened in 2012 the community contributed maize flour to provide a meal for the nursery children but as this depended on people having available food at home it soon ended.
In 2014 a Chinese NGO supported the community for a period of 4 months with a monthly supply of Maize (50kgs), Soya (10kgs), Pigeon peas and cooking oil.
Since August 2016 the community have provided school meals daily in partnership with Seibo.

Community Benefits
Since providing a hot meal at school daily the children’s health has improved and parents are now eager to send their children to Tawina.

Challenges
– The school toilet keeps collapsing. Building materials are costly
– Volunteers have to wake early morning to collect water to cook food for the children
– Tawina CBCC has no learning or teaching materials
– Tawina’s care-givers have not attended any formal training
– The nearest primary school is several kms away from the village.
When the little ones graduate from nursery the must set off around 6 am to reach school for 7:30 am. This is hard on those in their first year of Primary school (Standard 1 in Malawi). The community built the school block with two rooms so that standard 1 students could remain one year in the same area. The authorities have yet to recognize this initiative and have not yet agreed to provide a teacher.

Tawina Needs Your Help
The people in the community are struggling to feed their own families. As such they are unable to sustain the nursery with their own funds. They are a highly motivated community and are passionate to improve their children’s situation. Tawina is far from any other schools and is difficult to reach during the rainy season. This is one of the factors it has been sidelined to the point of neglect from a development perspective.
To catch-up with other nurseries and to provide a decent level of child care Tawina needs special funding. Seibo are on the ground and in regular contact with the community.
If you are in a position to help please make a donation or make contact with Seibo and let’s help Tawina!