WHAT is TEACH?
TEACH is a non-profit organisation whose objective is to encourage children and schools to support, partner with and engage into community work for and together with a Maasai school in Kenya.
Through fundraising events organised by young pupils in partner schools, either individually or as a school class, the association provides classroom materials, maintenance support, school building projects for the chosen Maasai primary and secondary school as well as enables training programmes for the Maasai teachers. Many Maasai children have no or little education due to the great distances between home and school. The training and support programmes intend to give children access to a differentiated education programme, to prevent illiteracy to continue in these villages and to offer a sustainable future to those children.
In addition, TEACH aims to simultaneously broaden the horizons of all participating school members' own students or individual members' children. Encouraging our own children in our urbanised society to develop a deep understanding of the multi-layered needs of other societies and to develop skills such as empathy, community service, vision, integrity and purpose is essential in our fast-paced and self-centred social media driven society. With this association, our children learn to design programmes to support others, take leadership for projects and responsibility for a long-term commitment, and develop creativity and spontaneity when faced with limited resources.
WHO is TEACH?
Six board members: We are teachers. We are parents. We are educators. We are citizens. We strongly believe that education is the key to bringing sustainability to remote villages, and the tool to build commitment and vision for our own youth in this challenging and self-focused world of social media. Please click here for contact information.
We are working with the Eiti team in Kenya: Five wonderful Maasai women and men. They are teachers. They are parents. They are community workers. They are community elders. They believe in change in their communities. They believe in education being the key to the sustainability of their villages and in giving future generations the means to fight poverty, drought and social problems like FGM.
HISTORY of TEACH
In 2017, Sonya Maechler-Dent, founder of the TANDEM IMS (International Multilingual School) in Zurich, visited a couple of schools in Africa and realised that there lay potential for both valuable development and for tangible engagement, and that her long-sought-after project for a two-way meaningful enriching programme might find its first expression with a partner school in Africa.
In 2018, with two of her colleagues, Deborah Schlatter and Elena Majer, as well as two enthusiastic school parents, Angelica Dünner and Barbara Bass, they all came together to breathe life into this worthwhile and long-term project, offering many opportunities for exchange for teachers and children. After a first project with a school in Namibia (which sadly closed due to Covid-19), the Maasai school in Kenya became the focus of the association, which was at first called TEACH (Tandem education in Africa - CH), yet will be renamed and given a whole new facelift in the spring of 2023. More news to follow.