Several hundred children walk into class at Project Canaan Academy (PCA) every school day, and for many of them, no one else in their family has ever finished the grade they’re now sitting in.
September 8th is International Literacy Day, a day UNESCO created to point at exactly this gap: the distance between a child who can read with confidence and a child who can’t, and how much of a life that distance ends up deciding. At Project Canaan Academy, we’ve spent years closing that gap one grade at a time. Now we’re facing the next one.
A School Built to Grow with Its Students
Project Canaan Academy is a fully accredited independent Christian school in Eswatini, recognized by the Independent Schools Association of Southern Africa (ISASA) since 2018, and this year we also received full accreditation from the Office of Independent Schools Evaluations, Southern Africa. Several hundred students are enrolled today, from preschool through Grade 8, and that number will keep climbing as new children are placed at Project Canaan in the years to come.
The approach isn’t one-size-fits-all. Teachers build lessons around Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences, recognizing that children learn differently and need different kinds of opportunities to show what they know. Kids who arrived with learning disabilities get remedial support and smaller class sizes, because, again, education is not a one-size-fits-all.
Most of the students at PCA are children living on Project Canaan. Others come from the surrounding community, families who pay tuition to send their kids here because the education is real and the door is open. Every student, regardless of where they go home to at night, gets the same classroom, the same teachers, and the same chance.
The Next Chapter: Grades 9 Through 12
Right now, Project Canaan Academy teaches preschool through Grade 8. That’s the honest state of things. We’re working toward a Grade 12 class crossing the stage in 2030, the first graduating class in the school’s history, and getting there means building four more grades’ worth of classrooms, teachers, and resources that don’t exist yet.
A high school isn’t an upgrade to a school that’s already finished. It’s the difference between a promising start and an actual future. A child who stops at Grade 8 has options. A child who finishes Grade 12 has a real shot at university, a trade, or a career, the kind of life an education is supposed to open up in the first place.
A Gift That Goes Further Right Now
We currently have a matching gift in place for donations toward building the high school of $50,000 CAD until October 8th. Every dollar given while that match is active goes twice as far toward the classrooms these kids are going to need in just a few years, not in some distant future.
Get More Information
If you’d like to know more about what it takes to build a high school from the ground up, or how your gift fits into that plan, our Development Manager, Jocie Breton, would love to talk it through with you.
You can reach her directly at Jocie@heartforafrica.org, or give toward the high school build directly by clicking below.