With all the challenges of lockdown and social distancing we haven’t been able to run our normal corporate volunteering days. So we were delighted to work with Simba Muguwe from BlackRock to work out how we could organise a remote volunteering day – and it was fantastic! We decided to take the opportunity to use the volunteers’ skills to create presentations aligned with the Computer Studies curriculum in Malawi. We also tasked them with finding resources relevant to the Mathematics syllabus in Malawi and uploading them to Kolibri – the learning management platform we use to deliver content offline in Malawi.
The day started with a brief introductory presentation, which included hearing from Sylvester Mtumbuku, one of the CYD team in Malawi. He talekd about our projects there and some of the challenges the schools face. One of the points he made was that many schools don’t even have enough textbooks for their students. This highlights the importance of ensuring that good quality content is available offline for all those schools where we have set up computer labs.
The 7 volunteers from BlackRock were all up for the challenge and quickly set to work. They achieved a huge amount in just one day with some fantastic presentations and content covering the Mathematics syllabus for Form 1 uploaded to Kolibri.
A massive thanks to all the volunteers for their enthusiasm and hard work. It really made the day a great success. Feedback was very positive and there were also several useful tips on how we could build on this in the future.