Partners’ main focus in Ethiopia is on improving schools and facilitating access to them. We build a lot of classroom blocks and outfit them with desks. Presently, in most rural schools in Ethiopia kids sit on crude benches (and often on rocks or logs) taking notes on pads balanced on their knees. And the schools are very crowded, often with upwards of 100 kids in classrooms. We can put up a very good cement block building consisting of 4 classrooms for approximately $50,000 and supply it with excellent desks (three kids to a desk) for another $6,000. At the end of the day it is hard to find a more predictably successful way of assisting a country like Ethiopia than by investing in its education system. That system is presently in very poor shape and this at a time when the population is skyrocketing. Everywhere there is a need for more schools and educational facilities.

Ethiopian rural schools are crowded and without toilet facilities. Kids “do their business” in and around the school and, not surprisingly, the premises are not very nice places to spend time. So, Partners tries to provide sanitary latrine facilities at the schools where we build classrooms and libraries. These are particularly important for the girls who are too modest to use the fields around the school and, as a result find attendance difficult.

This year Partners is also going to start a project which will provide modified panties and washable sanitary pads to several thousand rural students. Presently young girls simply stay home a few days each month as they have no access to the kind of supplies which young Canadian girls take for granted.