College facilities

On our project we were working with 6 Teacher Training Colleges, and were able to occasionally visit a school too. The colleges are residential, with 5 of the 6 overcrowded in terms of the number of students allocated to them vs actual college capacity. In most of these places there was at least a blackboard and chalk, but that was pretty much all you could count on:

Catering for the 1000+ student teachers who are resident at this particular college,

although the money to feed them is rarely enough and never comes in time.

Meat is given twice a week, and 'breakfast' is a cup of sweet tea. Kitchen staff?
Meant to be 1 per 100 students. Here there was a rota with 2 shifts
with 2 staff members each shift.

The dorms at one of the TTCs. Privacy? No chance. Malaria, or other?
Shared nice and easily.

The washing cubicles for the girls. About 450 of them (girls, that is).

The best library of all 6 TTCs we worked with....

....with the most recent books dating mostly from the 1960s and 70s.

Creative teaching!

Flipchart paper: more versatile than the blackboard.

In one of the more spacious teaching colleges,
students do a kinaesthetic activity. Hurrah!

Now to the science department. Imagine how expensive (and how breakable) all that glass laboratory equipment is? And the scales, jugs, rulers etc... Students learn how to make as much as possible using everyday resources:

The tutor explained the students had never seen a stopwatch,
but he had made this for them to see what one looked like
in case they ever got the chance to see and use one.
For timing actual experiments they use their mobile phones.

One thing never in short supply are plastic bottles. 

Back to the dorms: this is taken from another of our TTCs. The building here
was meant to be an office, but due to an increase in the demand for teachers (due to the MDGs??),
 the government assigned more students to the TTCs to become teachers. Erm, capacity??
Any follow-through on that thinking??

He counted himself lucky for at least having something to lean on.

Can YOU see what's on that blackboard??

I didn't see any student teachers without chairs,
but that doesn't mean an awful lot.

Loving the creative thinking for wardrobe alternatives.

Where do they store them in the rainy season?

Tightly-crammed classrooms does make kinaesthetic activity more difficult, and
student participation slightly more challenging, but not impossible.
I felt it was often used as an excuse for demotivated teachers.

In this college library neither students nor teachers liked to go in here
as it was also the storage space for the batteries taking solar charge.

Space = non-user-friendly access to borrowing books.
Yes, this was a library. We might call it a cupboard.



The female toilets for another of our colleges.



With the principal from Mpuguso and the senior team at a local school,
in front of one of the classrooms.

We visited a middle school where, for the last 5 years, they have achieved consistently high results despite a very evident lack of facilities. After speaking with the team we discover it is mainly down to the hard-work and long hours from the teachers; parents who support the school, and regular, rigorous testing of the students. Taught to test? Maybe. But if that's what the system demands, then maybe the fault lies with the system.

One of the teachers was retiring so today was a day of festivities, with no classes.

At least the daylight gets in. Do you see any lights otherwise?
And how would they be powered?

This is a classroom for approx. 30 students: the rest sit on the floor.
And hope the building doesn't collapse on top of them during lesson-time.

The student toilets.

Ventilation is clearly not an issue, but
 it does get cold up here in the mountains.





















The principals at our colleges were amazing: they felt the responsibility for those students, and worked hard to make changes to improve their situation, for example at Tandala they make their own bricks and are building new toilet facilities themselves. At Mpuguso the students had to go to the local river to get water, so when the new principal arrived she herself managed to arrange the piping of the water to the college. Raising funds by asking their community, who have little themselves. They do it, because no one else will. You might argue that as long as they are doing it, their government won't, but who suffers in the meantime? And when would it get done? All this is during a time when they're meant to be studying; learning; being taught, and teaching others, not fighting to survive.