Bursaries
The Community has established a Bursary Committee to define
terms of grants, establish criteria for eligibility, assess
applicants and engage in fund-raising.
Total costs to the school of providing
tuition, one meal per day and a uniform are estimated at
about Euro 150 (about £100) per year. In order to avoid
creating undue dependencies, however, the Committee has set
the bursary award level at about Euro 100. (£67) which
should cover tuition fees for a year. A separate Bursary
Fund bank account has been opened.
Each applicant has been interviewed by the
Committee, which has awarded 15 initial bursaries for 2007,
funding these from economies in building costs. The need now
is to finance the other 41 approved bursaries for this year,
and to enable all 56 bursaries to run for 4 years per pupil.
Each year another 50 to 60 qualified applicants for
bursaries are expected to join the school.
While the Committee very much welcomes
donations to meet the costs of bursaries, it considers that
this is not a viable long-term solution. It has, therefore,
begun to plan the creation of Income-Generating Activities,
including dairy farming, poultry rearing and brick-making,
with the goal of meeting a growing proportion of bursary
costs from within the community. These enterprises, however,
will take time to grow and generate income.
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How you can help
The best way to help is to commit to pay Euro 100 (£67)
per year for 4 years to support a Bursary which will
guarantee schooling for a boy or girl for the full secondary
school course. Payments can be made on an annual or more
frequent basis or as a lump sum to cover the full four
years. Smaller commitments to the Bursary Fund are also, of
course, most welcome. The Committee will provide you with
the name of the individual awardee and you would have the
option of receiving end-of-term reports and of entering into
one-to-one correspondence.Donors
are strongly discouraged from making any direct payments to
“their” awardee or his/her family. Similarly, awardees are
obliged not to write “begging” letters to their sponsors, at
the risk of losing their bursary. This is essential to avoid
inducing dependencies and creating jealousies within the
community and school.
Payments may be made via the two NGOs
supporting Got Matar – SONIA in Italy and PEAS
in UK, who will forward donations and donor details to the
Got Matar Community Development Group. Forms are
downloadable from the Donations page
here. Please write on
the form “For Got Matar Bursary Fund".
For enquiries, please contact:
Vanda Altarelli (v_altarelli@yahoo.co.uk)
Andrew MacMillan (andrew.macmillan@alice.it)
or telephone 0039 0564507930.
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