13 Sep 2018

Founder and chairperson of the Epistles Reach-Out Organisation, Ms Lesedi Oboneng, says there is need for everyone to roll up their sleeves and come up with ways to end school drop-outs.

“In all honesty there is no one solution to this challenge. We need everyone to lend a helping hand. We all need to participate at ensuring that no one drops out of school, as we believe that the locals have a better understanding of challenges they are facing in their community and help in providing solutions,” she said.

In an interview, Ms Oboneng indicated that Botswana, like other African countries, was facing an epidemic each year, where communities had high rates of school drop-outs as mostly, one third of low income and minority students fail to compete their basic education.

“Failure to graduate from primary, junior and senior school levels has now become a ticket to the underclass. Students who fail to graduate from basic education have many relationships with negative factors affecting the communities even their lives as well,” she said.

She highlighted the factors such as crime rate, unemployment, concentrated poverty, social justice and high social welfare costs, which proved that drop-outs were a drain to the economy.

Ms Oboneng said the campaign was dubbed, ‘the dropout epidemic awareness campaign, with the tagline ‘if not in school then where are they?’

“We are a non-governmental Christian based organisation that is aimed at reaching out to the disadvantaged and assist them with the goal of helping them to gain courage and focus to do something with their lives and to help them become productive members of society,” she said.

She said the campaign was aimed at informing the nation of the silent epidemic that is slowly affecting the lives of many, and consequently, the nation.

“Our main focus is to engage every parent, student, teacher, school and other members of the society towards prevention of dropouts and remind them that they can actively assist those who dropped out, to go back to school,” she said.

She further indicated that, their vision was, ‘reaching the unreached’, adding that they primarily targets those who dropped out of school at various levels as a result of various factors such as family problems, finances and failure to progress to the next level due to poor academic performance. This is a national campaign, which we are spearheading, in order to bring awareness of the alarming school dropout rates from all levels of education across the country, with the goal of reducing the number of drop-outs and make sure that they complete their highest level of education possible,” she said.

Ms Oboneng noted that the campaign will be rolled out beginning in Gaborone, then to other parts of the country, adding that they were pleading for all to assists in confronting the dropout crisis through a combination of efforts as they will be reaching their doors.

She noted that in order to curb school drop-out, there was need for all to work together and refrain from working in isolation.

“It is important that we stop working in isolation. Education involves the community, the student and their parent. We need to make the schools more vigorous and relevant by providing all the support that we can,” she said.