All the San / Bushman tribes are as a rule extremely poor with the average household income being around U$85 per month.
The San / Bushman also suffers from the lowest education level of all the people in Namibia. With less than 10 % of San / Bushman children completing high school.
In most cases there are no schools at the village and due to the low literacy rate there are also very few teachers to educate the children in their mother tongue.
Can you imagine what it must be like to send your 6 year old child to a nearby town, where they must go stay in a hostel and be educated by somebody that does not speak or understand your mother tongue?
In most cases, the school teacher at the Government school does not understand the mindset of the Hunter-Gatherer and this causes conflict from the get-go, and the way Hunter-Gatherers deal with conflict is to walk away.
Often we would find young children on the side of the road dealing with conflict in the only way they know – walking away.
Developing teachers from the village for the village
DEGNOS serving the SAN
DEGNOS has been very successful in developing Kindergarten teachers from within the community. These teachers have the benefit that they know the culture intimately, they speak the language and they are passionate about the education of their own villages kids.
We have started this project in 1995 and we currently have 16 schools that we support with 28 teaching staff that educates 450 children from the age group 4-6 .
Child feeding Scheme
Severe poverty affects children’s nutrition and children’s nutrition affects brain development. Studies have shown that children that are malnourished between the ages of 2 and 7 show significantly less brain development than those receiving a healthy balanced diet in these formative years.
At DEGNOS we, therefore, have a school feeding program in place whereby each one of the DEGNOS pre-schools is supplied with food on a monthly basis which is cooked for the children by village volunteers.
How can you get involved?
We are 100% dependent on donations to keep these little pre-schools going.
It costs us around U$100 per child per year to develop teachers, pay a small salary to the teachers, supervise and mentor teachers and feed the children.
Early Childhood Development Center at !Kandu Village
Early Childhood Development Center at Grashoek
With the generous donations from our partners and the labour from volunteers the children at Grashoek village got a new Pre-School.
Education is the only effective weapon to brake the poverty cycle.
