A nursery school for children of lower income families

« This nursery school strives to adequately prepare the children from the disadvantaged neighborhoods for primary education, at a price that is affordable to the bulk of the population. These children in fact have no access to the "conventional" private nursery schools, because the annual school fees are far too high.
And without a nursery school, they have virtually no chance of going on to a good primary school education. »

Vincent Duchateau

Namibia, a developing country, does not finance its nursery schools. Public money starts at primary school level and all the nursery schools are private - with rather high school fees.
And yet, the nursery schools play a crucial role in Namibia's educational system.

It is in fact in these first years of school that the children learn English - a language in which fluency is an absolute must for entering primary school.

This means that for the children of the disadvantaged neighborhoods of Windhoek, the capital, or for those who come from rural areas, access to primary school is seriously compromised due to the impossibility of registering in a private nursery school.

Teaching the children about the environment

To eradicate this problem, the Rainbow Pre-Primary Private School was created in 1996 for the purpose of welcoming the young children whose families cannot afford the cost of the other structures. It deepens its commitment by inculcating the children with respect for the environment (and especially water conservation).
On Friday afternoons and during the school holidays, it also trains the teachers who are then posted to the nursery school.

In 2007, however, the exemplary action of the Rainbow Pre-Primary Private School was in jeopardy because the association was forced to vacate the premises that it leased.
It then decided to construct its own buildings.

Thanks to its savings and to donations, it succeeded in acquiring a plot of land, and then financing all the structural work, but it remains to develop the outskirts (especially the school playground) and to equip the new classes with suitable facilities, both for the education of the children and for training the future teachers.

The grant to the school from the Veolia foundation will help bring these various projects to a satisfactory conclusion by a technical and educational accompaniment for the entire environmental conservation aspect.