COVID19: Home is Where the Hope is

When COVID-19 led to the closure of Zimbabwe’s schools, parents in Maureen Sigauke’s low-income neighbourhood knew that most educational alternatives were beyond their means. But her conversation with a neighbour sparked a collective initiative that has brought not only schooling, but solidarity and hope.

On 5 May, Zimbabwe’s schools were to have reopened for their second term – but COVID-19 changed all that. The Ministry of Education’s decision on 19 March to end the first term a week early and postpone the start of the second term was sound, given the importance of ensuring pupils’ and families’ health during a pandemic.

Eight weeks later, we do not yet know when it will be safe for schools to open their doors again. In the meantime, Zimbabwe’s parents and government have been exploring alternative ways to safely educate our children. E-learning, private tutoring and home-schooling have been proposed and deployed. But as the experiences of my neighbourhood show, there are countless pupils and parents for whom these options are beyond their reach. In a world where the pandemic has spurred governments, the great and the good to vow to reduce inequalities of all kinds and “leave no one behind”, we fear that children such as ours will be left behind nevertheless.

Despite the decades of challenges that have marred my country, I am a proud Zimbabwean who calls the Midlands town of Kwekwe home. In the high-density suburb of Mbizo where I live, most people ply their trades in the informal economy. Most are vendors, or artisanal miners whose work is undocumented and dangerous. The few who work in the formal sector meet the definition of “working poor”; precariously employed, and taking home far less than the living wage for their labour. The pandemic has hit their already low incomes hard, and, as Roseline Orwa, head of the Rona Foundation in Kenya has said of her own country’s context, for most people the struggle now is about putting food on the table every day.

E-learning is simply not an option for most Mbizo families, due to the high cost of data and the lack of necessary equipment. Private tutoring – commonly known as extra lessons – cost an average of $10 US a month per child; for those who might have taken home just $50 US per month in pre-pandemic times, it is an impossible dream. Home-schooling is arguably more achievable, but here, as is the case around the world, even in the global North, many parents lack the time, capacity, education or resources to become school administrators and teachers overnight. For parents in my neighbourhood waging a daily struggle with poverty, COVID-19 brought the fear that their children would not only be excluded from regular schooling, but also from the new learning platforms and options springing up in its place.

But although political will, policy implementation and purchasing power so often fall short for people like us, sometimes people power can make the difference.

One early morning a few weeks ago as I swept the front yard of my house, I got into a conversation – a shared lamentation, really – with my neighbour. These lamentations have become the norm in the weeks since lockdown was declared. The difference in this particular conversation was that we weren’t talking about the daily scramble for food and basic commodities, but about our children’s education, and our fear that the pandemic would set them even further back.

Another unusual thing about this conversation was that it sparked an idea: that perhaps we could solve the problem ourselves. That together, we could create safe and collective home-schooling. We both walked away feeling we could do something to ensure that our community was not left behind. For the first time in weeks, I did not feel helpless.

Several community meetings later – respecting the new requirement to keep gatherings to less than 10 people – we had determined that there were 38 children of primary- and secondary school-going age in our thirty-house street. We also confirmed that only a handful of households had either the required equipment for e-learning or the money to pay for the required data. The majority of children had no textbooks; the majority of parents were so busy trying to eke out a living that they had almost no time to give lessons. Many of us simply did not have the capacity and know-how to educate our children in line with national education curricula.

Having to take a close, honest look at everything our community lacked was disheartening. But at the same time as we were taking an inventory of everything we didn’t have, we were uncovering priceless community resources that we could harness.

Our street was lucky to have three teachers who said they were more than willing to volunteer their expertise and teach our children. We also had parents, mothers especially, who were willing to volunteer as classroom assistants under the teachers’ guidance. We had families offer to provide space in their houses for makeshift small classrooms. Alive to the reality of the pandemic, we also knew that practicing social distancing and good hygiene including hand-washing would be essential. Some neighbours with a little extra money pledged to buy the necessary supplies, and others of us blessed with kind networks squared our shoulders and asked for help. Looking at what we had in front of us, we realised that we might be disadvantaged, but we were not totally helpless.

For a week now, our children have been learning in spaces where extra measures have been taken to reduce the risk of infection. Most classes have four children and none have more than eight; pupils wear masks and sit a metre apart. The teaching assistants carefully ensure that hands are washed frequently. Textbooks are shared and pupils receive more attention from a teacher than they had in a crowded state school. In a time and place where bitter experience has taught that it is safer to be cynical and suspicious rather than hopeful and trusting, our neighbourly relationships are strengthening as our sense of Ubuntu is restored with each passing day.

Even more surprisingly, word has spread quickly of the “good thing” our street is doing. By the end of the week, we had 45 learners, six volunteer teachers and five teaching assistants. People from other streets are knocking on our doors, asking for help to create something similar to educate their own children, safely.

We know that our community home-school is far from ideal. Our unwaged teachers and teaching assistants, our shared textbooks and inexpensive workbooks, our old-school chalkboards and improvised chairs in spare rooms could never be considered state of the art. But we are confident that our community initiative is still close to perfect in guaranteeing the health and safety of all participants, and in ensuring that none of our children are left behind educationally. In the ongoing reality of poverty and in the wake of COVID-19, we realised that if we pooled our resources, time, capacities and expertise, our children could stay safe and continue to learn.

This once-in-a-lifetime pandemic has left people around the world feeling powerless and afraid. In our street in Kwekwe, we felt the same – until we saw how valuable community cohesion and collective solutions can be in responding to the fallout of coronavirus. From our little school in Mbizo, we hope that those in Harare and seats of power around the world are learning the same lessons we are teaching our children and ourselves. It is time for governments and those with resources and influence to rise up and innovate with interventions that can protect the vulnerable, and continue the fight against inequalities of all kinds.

The views expressed in this post are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity programme, the International Inequalities Institute, or the London School of Economics and Political Science.