Edoovillage #1987 - South Africa, East London: Hope School

Hope School IT classes for Skills Development Program

Hope Schools is based in East London, South Africa. We are a school for children infected with, or affected by HIV. Our children all come from the nearby townships of East London and are from very poor socio-economic backgrounds. We have 264 children from pre-primary school to Grade 11. Our goal is to provide our children with a strong and wellrounded Christian education.

As part of our curriculum for our high school students we have started a skills development program. Here we are teaching the children practical and vocational skills alongside the academic curriculum. The goal is to ensure that when the students leave us they are equipped to either study further, enter a trade, or start their own business. The youth unemployment rate in South Africa is over 50% and we want to ensure that our children do not become part of that statistic.

We would like to teach computer and IT skills to our older children, so that they may learn a basic competency in Microsoft Office, Windows, and using the Internet. We are also hoping to begin teaching some basic coding.

These skills would enable our children to find work in secretarial, office and IT sectors as well as being able to start their own business.

At present our school has 6 working desktop computers which are used mostly by the primary school children.