On World Children’s Day, we are delighted to share the story of the Ère Nouvelle school in Batalimo, Central African Republic, which illustrates the efforts of our local partners to make universal education a reality.

The Ère Nouvelle community school is located in Batalimo, in the south of the country, some 200 km from the capital Bangui. It is a village in the equatorial forest, whose inhabitants make their living from farming, fishing, gathering and logging. The village suffers from a lack of basic infrastructure: there is no electricity, running water or telephone network, and the health structure is precarious. There is also a lack of schools and qualified teachers.

The Ère Nouvelle school in Batalimo was set up in the 1990s as a tutelary school. Its activities took place in the open air, under the shade of a tree, and consisted of informal lessons in elementary reading and writing. Over time, these activities diminished in intensity, and gradually died out. That is when the Ahdieh Foundation was created to breathe new life into schools like this one, by providing training for teachers and supporting communities in the creation of new schools.

The Batalimo village.

In 2004-2005, when the Ahdieh Foundation began providing centralized teacher training in Bangui, the community of Batalimo sent its candidates to initiate the kindergarten class. Each year, training for a higher class was given, and after seven years the school had all the qualified teaching staff. 

The resources to be trained were selected from the local population and had not necessarily benefited from advanced schooling. Almost all of these teachers had not completed secondary school. 

After the training provided by the Ahdieh Foundation, the Ère Nouvelle school was able to draw on local human resources, all of whom were residents of the locality, to teach all grades, from kindergarten to 5th grade. In this way, the school has never had to wait for teachers from elsewhere to be assigned to it, as is the case in public schools, which are sometimes faced with teachers abandoning their posts when they return to their localities of origin.

Teachers from the Ère Nouvelle school teaching and in training.

As time went by and experience grew, the number of teachers to be trained became greater and greater, leading the foundation to decide to decentralize its structure to extend into the regions of the country, in order to be closer to the population and to be able to adapt to the specific realities of each region. Batalimo is located in the Ompella M’poko region, and the Lobaye sub-region. Since 2011, the Lobaye sub-region has had its own teacher training site, with headquarters in Batalimo. The site’s teacher training facilitators are experienced teachers from Ère Nouvelle.

The Ère Nouvelle school is financially supported by the community. In the early days, parents did not pay their school fees correctly. The teachers, driven by a strong spirit of sacrifice, patiently educated the parents to meet their obligations. Community meetings were held to reinforce parents’ understanding of their duty to educate their children. In this way, contributions to support the school increased substantially, and today the school receives over 90% of school fees from parents, which are spent on teachers’ salaries and the running of the school. When the efforts of the local population had reached their limit, the foundation granted long-term repayable aid to the school, to help improve the quality of the school buildings and increase the number of classrooms. 

Since 2012, the Ère Nouvelle school has been releasing a class of students each year who complete the primary cycle and take an exam to move on to the secondary cycle. The school has distinguished itself in the region by setting records for the number of students admitted to these exams, which are invariably above 99%, often with a 100% pass rate.

Teacher training organised by the Ahdieh Foundation; children from the Ère Nouvelle school.

Unfortunately, there is no secondary school in the area. Parents are forced to send their children away from their families, to Moungoumba or Mbata, localities more than 20 km and 30 km away respectively. This problem is of concern to the entire population of Batalimo, who are looking for ways to create a local secondary school. Community conversations have begun in 2019 with the help of the foundation, and the hope is that they will lead to the creation of this secondary school as soon as possible. 

The eyes of the population are riveted on the Ère Nouvelle school as a source of hope. Indeed, the school has initiated pioneering actions for the village’s progress. Conversations about education as the basis for development have awakened and edified the population. Nowadays, there is an urgent need to communicate by telephone and internet. The school took the initiative of approaching a cell phone company in Bangui to extend its network to the village. The school has become the cement that strengthens the bonds of friendship, cooperation and mutual support in the community. And the population has taken full ownership of the school – it has truly become a community school.