Lupani: A School to be Proud of

In 2011, Classroom Africa replaced the Sekute community’s one-room dilapidated schoolhouse with the modern, six-classroom Lupani Community School. This was followed by an expansion to the school, which was completed in November of last year.

Located in Kazungula, Zambia, Lupani now boasts classrooms for each of the seven grades in the country’s primary education curriculum, as well as a library, administrative offices, housing for teachers and improved sanitation facilities. An array of solar panels provides electricity at night, enabling lesson preparation for teachers and adult literacy classes for community members.

But the school’s physical infrastructure is only one component of Classroom Africa’s more holistic approach. After construction is complete, Classroom Africa continues to provide ongoing support to school staff and administration — including professional development for teachers, educational technology and facility maintenance — ensuring students receive the quality education they need and deserve.

Bringing Cutting Edge Tech into the Classroom

When Classroom Africa’s local partner Sifunda asked teachers at Lupani to identify the key challenges they often face, concern about effectively navigating the wide range of students’ literacy levels quickly became apparent. Recent changes in the government curriculum and a lack of resources related to them had made it difficult for these educators to effectively manage literacy development across the spectrum found in their classrooms.

With training support from Sifunda, the teachers at Lupani now have a powerful new tool for helping overcome this challenge — iSchool’s ZeduPad. iSchool, a comprehensive e-learning program, has mapped the entire Zambian primary school curriculum in eight local languages, and pre-loaded it onto their government-sanctioned ZeduPad tablets.

Upon completion of the expansion at Lupani, the school was provided with an entire ZeduPad school package — complete with 16 student tablets, seven teacher tablets for lesson planning, projectors, headphones and one year of teacher training and support.

This valuable teaching aid promotes peer- and self-learning, while also providing lesson plans and interactive multimedia learning materials. ZeduPads offer reading schemes (for remedial and adult literacy classes), reference and research resources as well as exam preparation — far more than what is provided by conventional means. These tablets enable Lupani’s teachers to cater to the variety of literacy levels they see in their classrooms, bolstering their capacity and engaging students on an individual level.

A School Grounded in Conservation

Classroom Africa took on the construction, expansion and ongoing support of the Lupani School in exchange for the Sekute community agreeing to set aside 20,000 hectares of land as a community conservancy, protecting a large swath of critical elephant habitat.

Safeguarding the natural resources that surround the communities in which it works is a major goal of Classroom Africa’s work. Communities make commitments regarding land and its management, receiving first class learning spaces and ongoing educational support in return.

These investments in rural primary schools not only provide improved educational opportunities and outcomes, but increase the tangible value of the community’s land as the result of their commitment to conservation.

Classroom Africa takes its conservation focus a step further by working with schools and local partners to integrate conservation education into the day-to-day activities of the school. At Lupani, the Classroom Africa team worked diligently with school administration and staff to develop an education plan that reinforces the sustainable use of natural resources, is locally-tailored to highlight resident species, and complements Zambia’s national curriculum. This has resulted in a rich co-curricular program with an eco-club, annual conservation camps, community awareness programs and more.

Local partners help bring Lupani’s conservation education plan to life. In July of last year, teachers attended their second conservation awareness training with Children in the Wilderness — a nonprofit focused on environmental education — while the month before students and teachers celebrated World Giraffe Day with lessons and other fun activities focused on the world’s tallest land mammal. In August, grade 7 students were able to participate in their first trip to Mosi-oa-Tunya National Park and Victoria Falls as a celebration of the end of term, thanks to the generosity of Bushtracks Africa, a renowned safari tour operator.

Raising the Bar for Primary Education

Since its opening, students and teachers have both thrived in the improved learning spaces. Lupani’s enrollment has more than quadrupled, jumping from 50 students to 234 students from kindergarten to grade 7. In the 2015 academic year, the pass rate for the Grade 7 was at an all-time high of 94 percent, with seven students accepted to boarding school for the first time in Lupani’s history.

Access to quality education and a renewed commitment to supporting the school as a center of excellence have made the Lupani Community School one of the region’s top performers — it is recognized near and far as an exceptional school. As the Provincial Education Officer for Zambia’s Ministry of Education put it, “all our schools should be like Lupani.”