TZANEEN:Tutu desks bring hope

The campaign which is an offspring of the Desmond Tutu Foundation in collaboration with My School, My Village, My planet, donated over 2000 mobile desks, school bags with stationery and plain paper to four schools in the Tzaneen area.

Maponya Primary School, Bordeaux Primary School, Sepeke Primary School and Montsheng Primary School, were the lucky beneficiaries of the donations.

“We chose these four schools, because they are underprivileged schools and were in dire need of the desks.

“A school such as Maponya was 50% short of desks and Sepeke was 80% short of desks,” explained Samuel Mokoena, from The Tutu Desk Campaign.

Mokoena and his team first visited the schools in July 2017 for a formal research on the needs of the schools.

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The desks are user-friendly, all that the learners have to do is, just put it on their laps and start writing, they can even carry them home to do their homework.

The campaign has been now active for more than 11 years and has been helping learners throughout Africa in countries such as Zimbabwe, Liberia, Tanzania, Angola and even in India.

The project aims to deliver at least 20million Tutudesks to 20 million children by 2025.

“We are also in partnership with the Department of Education and in the meantime the learners will use the desks while they wait for the department to provide them with proper desks,” added Mokoena.

The Deparment of Education in the province commended the great job the campaign is doing.

“We appreciate immensely every donation because we know together we can do a lot more for our schools.

“We call upon others to emulate this good gesture as it talks to education being a societal issue,”said Sam Makondo, Spokesperson of Department of Education in Limpopo.

TutuDesk campaign as are already back in the Tzaneen area, doing research on other underprivileged schools.