Zest 4 ... the Gambia

or what on earth am I doing in Africa? :)

Here it is, Friday again! Another opportunity to chat with you, my wonderful readers, about what I have been up to this week and to acknowledge some of the wonderful responses I received last week, when I asked for your ideas on what would interest you.

I really want to thank those of you who gave me some excellent ideas. I am currently working on developing some of your ideas, so bear with me, please. Researching fascinating topics like ‘The changing role of women in the Gambia’ and ‘Travelling with children in Africa’ is giving me a wonderful excuse to chat with many interesting people here and I am learning a lot!

This week, however, I am going to make good on a promise I made in my first post from the Gambia and respond to this question:

What on earth am I doing in Africa? 😊

I can almost hear the groans coming from my longsuffering family members and close friends, who have almost certainly heard their fill of the answer to this burning question!

In a nutshell, I am here to work out how to develop Further and Higher educational pathways for Gambian young people who are academically or entrepreneurially gifted, have graduated from Upper Basic School through our charity’s sponsorship and have hit a dead end.

*And lest you are wondering what these Gambian blogs have to do with Zest 4 Sicily or Zest 4 Organic Food Growing, I shall enlighten you! 10% of any profit we make from our delicious artisan Casa Rehoboth organic olive oil, our online organic food growing consultancy, my book sales and other writing  and anything else on which Zest makes a profit, goes directly to support our work in the Gambia!

Until very recently, our charity, Ceesay Nursery and Primary School worked to find educational sponsors to enable Gambian children from very impoverished homes or who were also orphans, to attend school from nursery school up to and ending at graduation from Year 12.

This has been successful beyond our initial aspirations, when we first registered as a charity in 2011. Back then we just wanted to help some little kids from very poor families attend nursery school, so they had a better chance of success when they entered the appallingly overcrowded and under resourced state funded primary schools.

Our mission: Ceesay Nursery and Primary School is a small charity run entirely by unpaid volunteers that works to provide loving, compassionate early years education to very disadvantaged, poor and orphaned children in the Gambia.

Over the years, this mission evolved. With the help of many incredibly generous friends and family members, colleagues, professionals from all walks of life and even a company or two, we were able to buy land and build a community nursery school for the benefit of the children of Mandinary, a particularly poor neighbourhood in Serrekunda, greater Banjul. That was a wonderful success and achievement and we proudly opened the school and the library, dedicated to my late mum, Virginia Stuart, in 2017.

Once we had land and a school, we went on to develop a community hub and worked in partnership with other organisations like the excellent My Farm to respond to the stated needs of the community. They helped us to offer small business training to the local women, to empower them to earn the money they needed to send their children on to Lower and Upper Basic School. Many incredible volunteers and sponsors from the UK and Europe came out to the Gambia at various times, all at their own expense, to support the development of this project.

Sadly, it eventually proved impossible to effectively manage the ongoing development of the nursery school and the school based projects from Europe. The existing infra-structure in the Gambia was not established strongly enough to be self-sustainable and the Covid pandemic put an end to many promising projects in the Gambia, including our women’s enterprise project.

Eventually in 2023 we handed over the nursery school to the Alkalo (village chief) and the Mandinary Village Development Committee to manage and further develop the school for the benefit of their children. This had been our ultimate goal but it did not quite happen in the way our European minds imagined it would!

However, in parallel, thanks to our incredibly dedicated and hard-working Gambian staff team, we did have what proved to be a very successful educational sponsorship programme. Despite not being able to attend school for almost 2 years (the schools all shut down due to the Covid pandemic and were very slow to reopen) and with no real access to remote learning, most of our sponsored children and youths rallied and went back to school, caught up and many started graduating with excellent results!

For me, this is a real testimony to the resilience and determination of Gambian youths to make a better life for themselves (and usually also to their incredible mums who understand the opportunity they have been given and push their children to make the most of it).

So, we started to have very academically gifted young people with an Upper Basic School qualification that they had worked against all the odds to achieve and no clear pathways to go further. In the Gambia, there are very few ‘jobs’ as we know them in the UK. The jobs that do exist are usually handed out as favours to those who know someone in power and/or are of the ‘right’ tribal background.

We knew we needed to evolve and move forward again!

One young man, one of the earliest to be sponsored, proved to be a brilliant mathematician. His sponsor helped him through university and he graduated at the top of his class. He taught maths for two years and then was offered a full scholarship to do his Masters degree in America! For young people here, that is an impossible dream that is more appealing than winning the lottery! Even better, this young man is committed to coming back to the Gambia when he completes his studies, to help lift others like himself and his own country!

Two other Upper Basic graduates, young women, miraculously, found sponsors willing to send them both to nursing college. One, a very gifted and determined young woman, even has a commitment from a couple of our charity’s good friends to fund her all the way through her medical training. Her dream is to be a doctor here in the Gambia and eventually she aims to be Minister of Health for Women! They met her as a brilliant and articulate 14 years old and were so impressed that just this Christmas they committed to helping her achieve her dreams.

So….you can see where this is going. I am here to look for partners, existing organisations, and other people with whom we can work so that even more of our brilliant, hardworking young people have access to pathways to take them further!

I visited a young man this week, who also wants to be a doctor. He is top of his class in every subject despite having no textbooks of his own (we solved that problem quickly!) as his family are far too poor to buy books. He lives with about 30 members of his extended family in a few dirt floored rented rooms in a falling down compound. They have no access to electricity or running water. It is impossible for him to study after 7pm when it gets dark, or before 8:30 in the morning when it gets light. He walks over 2 hours to school and back. Yet he is top of his class! He is also a polite, articulate, well-spoken young man. He wants to make a better life for his family.

Meeting young people like this makes everything we do feel worthwhile.

So, we will be helping him to get a solar lantern so he can study and as soon as we can raise the funds, a second-hand bicycle so he can get to school quickly and if he continues to do well, we will do our best to match him with an educational sponsor who can help him even more.

In a country where the rate of inflation was 20% last year (the UK’s inflation in 2023 was 3.4%) more and more families, even working ones, cannot afford to feed their children. For the poorest families, it is more than desperate.

Talking with some good friends here in Gunjur, who have been working in the Gambia for over 20 years, I was told they have never seen conditions so harsh. In this rural area alone, over 600 people, not just men, but since Covid, whole families including women and children, have just disappeared overnight, to try to make a better life for themselves by going the ‘back way’ to Europe.  This journey is beyond horrific and crossing the sea is only one small part of the nightmare.

I believe our work is now more crucial than it has ever been. I am convinced none of us want to read about one more drowned child washing up on our European or English shores.

Finding ways to facilitate opportunities, even just little ones, for young Gambians, so they can make a better life for themselves here in the Gambia is not so hard and it reaps rewards for them but also for us, beyond anything you can possibly imagine. It is the best antidote I know of, for the relentless negativity and sense of helplessness and despair we all feel when we tune into the latest evening horror show, otherwise known as the news.

We can all make an enormous difference in someone’s life, unbelievably just for the cost of one pint of beer or one glass of wine a month. Get in touch with me personally, if you want to know more.

Thanks again for reading my post – I know this one was not easy reading and fairly sombre.  I make no apology because I think EVERYONE can make so much more of a difference than they imagine and I wanted to show you one simple way to do this.