A Scholarship for A Child To Go To School in Afric

Dear Supporters,

As we look back over the last three months, the harsh reality of COVID-19’s impact on our community project here in Limpopo South Africa is astounding. Not only have we been unable to continue our lessons and development workshops with the learners at both the primary school and creche throughout the entire pandemic, but our fundraising efforts have also basically come to a standstill. With the promising news that international travel will open in October and the GVI Limpopo hub can once again start welcoming new participants from low-risk countries, we may yet be able to recover from the last few months and finish 2020 on a high.

What impact has this hibernation period done to our community hub objectives?

At the end of each year, staff sit down together and discuss our yearly hub objectives - what worked? What didn’t? What can be improved or altered? We had high hopes for our community goals in 2020, with a new and passionate community officer in place and a growing desire to make more of a difference we set ourselves goals to increase our impact in the area. One objective included increasing the amount of learners taken on game drives from 55 in 2019 to 70 in 2020, however only 16 were able to join us on two drives at the beginning of the year. We also realistically set the number of environmental education (EE), youth development (YD), and sports practice lessons (S) to 16, 14 and 14 respectively at the beginning of the year, however only 5 EE, YD and S lessons each were able to be conducted (15 total). We also aimed to improve our qualitative study outcome from a 70% environmental awareness increase to a 75% increase, and complete four upliftment projects rather than two in 2019, however we were unable to carry out any upliftment projects, and due to the sheer number of lessons missed this year it would not be realistic to complete the qualitative survey for 2020. In addition to this, our objective to sponsor four National Scholarship Program students during the year was also affected by the hibernation, as we were only able to sponsor one student, at the beginning of the year. 

Goals for the end of 2020!

However bad these figures are and disheartening it’s been during our hibernation period, the news of base being given the green light to open and international travel slowly opening again into South Africa in October gives us many reasons to stay positive and plan for the last quarter of 2020. Our goals are to still organise an end-of-year activity or upliftment project with the learners of the primary school as well as our local creche, sponsor at least half of the reusable menstrual pads planned for the young girls in our class, take as many learners on game drive as we can manage, and continue our environmental education and youth development classes (with a little tweaking of course) until the end of the school year.

Thank you once again

To our readers, sponsors and supporters, we want to once again thank you for your assistance throughout the easier years, and all the stressful months that have been 2020. Your selfless acts of kindness and generosity helping us to truly make a positive impact in our local community has never gone unnoticed, and we plan to continue our work well into the future once we’re back on our feet. Without your support and that of Action Change (formerly The GVI Trust), we would not be able to sustainably work with and empower our local community members and engage our staff and volunteers to make that difference too.

Love, 

The GVI Limpopo Team