Previously there was:
With only one small secondary school in the area, many children were unable to continue their education to Secondary level.
Previously, the Secondary School in Fiwila enabled children to study up to grades seven or nine (equivalent of UK years six to eight). The new school, completed in 2007, extended the school to grade 12 (equivalent of UK year 13).
Fiwila Secondary School was Build It’s first building project.
With your support:
Working with the Shropshire Fiwila Partnership, the aim of the project was to provide a completely new secondary school that would allow children to go on to further education.
There were celebrations in January 2008 when the local school opened its first ever secondary class.
In 2008, the second phase of work took place, with the construction of two laboratory classrooms, an ablution block and a teacher’s house. The project included new water tanks and rainwater harvesting.
The school desperately needed a new dormitory. Whilst there was accommodation for the girls on site, there was no accommodation for the boys who lived too far away to commute to school daily. To attend school, the boys squatted in abandoned buildings in the village, cooking for themselves.
The new 46 bed dormitory was the third phase of work at Fiwila and was completed in time for the 2010 new school year. It has made an incredible difference to the education and the safety of the children at Fiwila Secondary School.
Since we left…
In 2009, King’s College Wimbledon formed a Community Service Programme with Fiwila School. In August 2010, a party of staff and sixteen boys spent two weeks in Fiwila. Ian Davies from King’s explains how the Science Labs are having a positive benefit to the teachers and students at Fiwila;
‘It was good to find two large, well set up laboratories in use at the High School and we were able to carry out practical Chemistry and Physics lessons with the Fiwila students. Science is a very practical, hands-on enterprise that requires experiments to properly train students for the future.’
