Malawi

R World in Africa

On launching R World, a partnership was formed with the High Five Club, a UK registered charity with an established reputation of working hand in hand with impoverished communities living in wildlife areas of Africa. As their partners, our first donation to Africa was to a poor region in the Luangwa valley, Malawi.  The High Five Club had funded a primary school : HAJIMAC ACADEMY PRIMARY SCHOOL two years earlier but funds were lacking for the teachers and R World agreed to donate £2,000 to pay for 5 community school teachers to work for a year. As reported in the High Five Club’s newsletter, the intention of this was to give the board of trustees of the Brown Munthali Foundation (who own and run the school) the time needed to build up income streams from paying pupils, to secure new donors and to submit grant applications in order to achieve financial sustainability in relation to the school’s operational costs.

Following this donation, R World has built up a good relationship with the Brown Munthali Foundation and, although we are no longer working as partners to the High Five Club and are therefore free to decide which projects to fund ourselves, we are committed to continuing to empower and encourage the school to achieve self-sufficiency. 

Malawi and Brown Munthali

Malawi, like many other African countries is suffering from a devalued currency and remains one of the poorest countries in the world.  The Russian-Ukraine war has only made things worse.

Since providing funding for the teachers, it has been a pleasure to get to know Brown Munthali and to build up a relationship of trust. The Brown Munthali Foundation carries out charitable work developing the community of Chitimba and helps the poorest people in Malawi; vulnerable children, orphans and broken families.

Meet Brown

Brown’s work with orphans is so important as it reduces street crime, begging and also in the long term he is aiming to keep them away from ‘an exploitive custom’ which is flourishing whereby trading fish for sex has become the norm in Malawi’s fishing communities. Many buyers are women who have no choice but to trade their bodies to guarantee a sale, thereby spreading Aids/HIV and other diseases.

As well as providing a home for the orphans, he is feeding and educating them and is working to making them employable in the future. This is remarkable as Brown himself is very poor but has some great ideas for a more independent way forward; one being the building of homestays to accommodate people on holiday.

With the rise in the cost of living however, a difficult situation has been made more difficult with the teachers he employs in Malawi demanding more money. He has therefore had to resort to taking on unqualified teachers which has led to a poor standard of teaching in certain subjects. In turn, this has  led to most of the fee paying pupils leaving for other schools. To help out a bit, the trustees of R World agreed to provide another £1,000 in the knowledge that Brown is working on other plans to achieve self-sufficiency.

Robbie’s Legacy

Since R World was created, the intention has been to establish a permanent legacy for Robbie in Africa. An opportunity has now arisen which fits into Brown’s long-term plan. The trustees of R World have just helped to secure a piece of land for him close to the primary school so that a library can be built. The library, which we are aiming to fund, when built will serve 2,000 people in the community as well as the children he looks after. It is hoped that this will attract fee paying children to the school, which in turn will pay for teachers.  It should also provide jobs for the orphans when they are older. 

25th birthday trees

One of the benefits of working with Brown is that he is a great communicator and has been very sensitive to R World’s wish to establish a legacy for Robbie. With a small amount of funds, he has established Robbie’s field which Brown’s orphans and children water regularly in the dry season.  

R World looks forward to future work with the Brown Munthali Foundation!

See our blog post R World in Africa

The store room is nearly complete now.

R World has already bought the land for the library and store room which will be built alongside it. This is the store room – in the process of being built!

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