OVERVIEW:
Niger is one of the poorest countries in the world. Rotary recognizes education as a key element for escaping poverty. This project seeks to improve education by providing school furniture, which will encourage a vastly improved educational environment.
PROBLEM:
Approximately 400,000 Nigerien children attend school in rural classrooms with no furniture. They must try to maintain attention and learn from their teachers while sitting on the dirt and sand of the ground. Traditional Nigerien school furniture quickly succumbs to the weather within rural straw classrooms. Furthermore, the traditional furniture is bulky and difficult to transport and nearly impossible for a village to store. These factors prevent the government from providing furniture (or textbooks in many cases) to 11,000 rural schools.
SOLUTION:
Even under a straw classroom, good teachers can provide quality education to their students provided that they have at least one table, a teacher desk and chair, student desks and benches, a blackboard, and a closet to keep and protect books and notebooks from the wind and rain. The Rotary Club of Niamey Croix-du-Sud has designed, built and patented a type of school furniture adapted to poor rural realities. This furniture endures the rain as it is constructed entirely out of rust resistant metal and is much more robust than the traditional desks that are built with rot-prone and termite-prone plywood. It can be entirely taken apart to facilitate transportation and is easy to store during the rainy season. It takes 5 minutes to assemble and take the furniture apart without using tools. A much needed portable latrine will also be provided to each school. The goal is to make this furniture available to rural areas through decentralized workshops throughout Niger.
DELIVERABLES FROM THIS GRANT:
- One workshop, complete with all the equipment to produce school furniture.
- Completed school furniture for 10 schools, which would house a total of 500 children.
- Trained artisan craftsmen to continue operating the workshop and to provide furniture to schools into the future.
SCHEDULE (4 months total):
- 1 month to choose the workshop site, (i.e. verifying the local need, and the ability of artisans) and to provide equipment.
- 3 months of training and construction of the first batch of furniture with a master craftsman already trained by the Rotary Club of Niamey Croix-du-Sud.
- The project is complete when the workshop is fully operational, the certificates are given to the trained artisans, and when the furniture is made available to communities at subsidized prices. | 
