Braidhurst High School, joined the North Lanarkshire ‘Aiming Higher in Malawi’ project in March 2017. The project linked Braidhurst with a school in Malawi called MisanJo CDSS (Community Day Secondary School). The CDSS schools are the poorest schools in Malawi. The main drive of the project is to improve the attendance of girls and disabled children in secondary education. We also worked with the ‘Girls go for Health’ programme which aims to encourage girls to go to school and provide them with materials to sustain their educational journey. In Malawi, education is pivotal to survival and the rate of girls progressing into high school from primary school is very low.  One of the reasons for girls dropping out school is that when girls go through their menstrual cycle, they are not equipped to manage themselves in school and fear the embarrassment from their peers – so they drop out of school.

In preparation for our visit, the Malawi ambassadors visited ‘Sew Confident’, in Bothwell, to make reusable sanitary towels. Since joining the programme, Braidhurst’s Malawi committee organised over 30 fundraising events including: bake sales, bag packing, car washes, tin collections at football games, variety shows and race nights. In advance of their visit to Malawi the committee managed to raise over £15,000 in 18 months which allowed them to donate to specific projects on our visit, for example, including sponsoring individual families with disabled children. We flew to Malawi for 10 days along with 6 other schools in North Lanarkshire in June. The main focus of the visit was our partnership school, MisanJo CDSS where we met all staff and their 400+ pupils.

During the visit Malawi ambassadors painted a classroom and planted a vegetable garden. The group also paired with MIYO brand, a printing company in Motherwell, who provided us with clothing to wear whilst painting the classrooms. KIER Construction also donated protective clothing for our visit. The head teacher at Misanjo CDSS, Elias, was absolutely over the moon with our efforts. Other activities that our Malawi group led was the delivery of lessons on first aid and heart start. We played netball and football with them too after we donated football strips from Motherwell F.C and the Scottish Football Association.

In Mulanje, Malawi, we visited the Assessment Centre at the U5 Disabled Camp where young mothers take their disabled children to be weighed and assessed. Our pupils engaged with all the mothers and children and enjoyed helping to feed the babies, giving out stickers, and playing games. We also visited the Tailoring factory where our ambassadors were able to purchase items made by the mothers of the disabled children. Our pupils also visited Blantyre Prison where they performed some musical pieces for the prisoners and also watched a singing and dancing display performed by the inmates. The visit aside, the trip provided our children with a greater appreciation of a developing country such as Africa, a level of poverty that we have never seen.  Our pupils who not only went on the trip, but our committee of 40+ pupils at Braidhurst High School of pupils from S1-6, developed a greater sense of global citizenship and appreciation of a wider world and culture.