Imagine you were born in one of the poverty-stricken suburbs of Khartoum, the capital of Sudan. Your grandparents have been displaced by the war in the Nuba Mountains or in Darfur. Your mother, who never went to school herself, cleans homes in one of the richer neighbourhoods in the city centre. Your father is a day labourer. There is no chance whatsoever to enter a good but expensive private school. At state schools, you learn next to nothing, as classes of 100 pupils are no exception.
Fortunately, there is the self-help school …
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Elrayan School
In 2017, five Coptic teachers from the Nuba Mountains rented an empty space very cheaply in a poor suburb in Omdurman, Khartoum’s sister city, and set up the Elrayan primary school there. The new self-help school was initially known as a Christian school, but soon Muslim children also enrolled. The school’s reputation grew quickly, as its final exam results were much better than those of students from state schools nearby …
Salwa’s kindergarten
Salwa Abdelrahman started looking after toddlers and preschoolers in one of Khartoum’s poverty-stricken suburbs in 2009. The little ones roamed the streets because their mothers were out to earn their daily income. Salwa built a thatched shelter in her mother’s house and invited the kids in. Apart from gratis daily lessons, she also offers them a breakfast in her kindergarten which she has been running for over 15 years now …
Eisa Mahanna School
The Eisa Mahanna School for children with disabilities is located in Elgezira Aba, a large island in the White Nile, about 300km south of the capital Khartoum. The little school is named after the father of psychologist Hanadi Eisa. As secretary of state for the Sudanese Ministry of Education in the 1980s, he set up more than a hundred schools in the country but could not find customised education for his own son who had a brain defect …
