Selection

We select children from the Salima district who have passed standard 8. Our selection is based on the highest potential, most vulnerable and most willing (checked by appearance) children. We create personal scholarships whereby the child (or the parents) pay 0 – 50% themselves. We try to support 50 % boys and 50% girls, but since there are a lot more scholarships for girls via other organizations we do not have a 50-50 rate.

The selection procedure starts with the standard 8 Primary School Leaving Exam (PSLE) results and the best children are selected by the government for national boarding school and the ones with the lowest pass rate for community day school. Therefore we support mainly children for national and district boarding school, because according to the PSLE result these are the highest potential children.

Currently we will only support children for Community Day School when they are selected for National Boarding School and neither the child, their parent(s), nor any other organization can pay the fee for a boarding school for them.

For the selection we are working together with the District Education Manager (DEM) of the Salima district because he has the best overview (as well as all the results) of the children at the 153 primary schools in the district, who are the most vulnerable ones and which children will be supported by the government ( MoEST; Ministry of Education, Science and Technology) or other organizations like CAMFED or UNICEF (they only support girls).

In the Salima district there are 16 Community Day Schools and 2 District Boarding Schools (in Chipoka and Salima), so the children who pass standard 8 at one of the 153 primary schools in the district are selected for one of these schools. There are no national boarding schools in the Salima district, so if a child is selected for National Boarding School they have to go to another district. We are currently supporting students for National Boarding Schools in Nkhata Bay (Robert and Aron), Dowa (Isaac) and Kasungu (Brown). Sometimes children selected for District Boarding School can find a place in another district as well if there is no place left at Salima or Chipoka Secondary School.