Projects
Throughout southern Africa people are working on innovative projects to address the desperate need for education. Canon Collins Trust supports these positive developments by funding individuals and communities, where we can.
Canon Collins Trust now supports a number of small projects, focusing on education, where we can enable local communities to help themselves. Our backing is more than just financial, and provides essential support to help generate self financing projects through advice and partnership during their initial growth period. In this way we can build ground breaking and successful ways for south African people to create better future for themselves.
Phelophepa Health Train: With a dedicated team of dentists, community nurses, opticians, counsellors, pharmacists and health educators, the ‘Miracle Train’ brings hope, healthcare and support to poor, rural South Africans. The Trust supports the Train’s health education programme. Through these ‘Edu-Clinics’, volunteers from communities with little or no access to health services are trained in basic healthcare, childcare, nutrition, and HIV/AIDS prevention and care, so they can help others. The ‘Edu-Clinics’ have now reached hundreds of thousands of people, and are being rolled out across the country as an excellent example of health training.
Giyani Science Centre: The Trust has supported the Centre, based in South Africa, since 1994 and is implementing a project to improve the standard of mathematics and science education. The Trust’s funding has enabled the Centre to provide 19 schools with computer labs and software as well as teacher training.
Farm Orphan Support Trust: Funding from Canon Collins Trust helps ensure that this Trust pays schools fees for orphans in Zimbabwe. Many are orphans because they have lost their parents to AIDS and the Trust also provides counselling training to teachers as well as HIV/ AIDS awareness activities.
Merrian Women’s Club: This Zambian women’s organisation runs a range of activities for women. Canon Collins Trust funding means it can offer scholarships to promising Zambian students who cannot afford university fees.
Our commitment to seeding projects like these means that people on the ground in southern Africa can generate new ideas to benefit their disadvantaged community, and receive the nurture they need at a critical stage in their development. Once they have the infrastructures in place they can go on to find public or private sector support to ensure their long term stability. Without Canon Collins Trusts’ early intervention these local innovations may never germinate into real solutions.
Financial support is urgently needed to help build a growing portfolio of projects, and to meet our vision of enhancing local skills with a network of educationally focused community initiatives. Considerable investment will be required to allow our development of this flourishing, imaginative and empowering approach. Our office based in South Africa provides us with a foothold from which to better locally manage this vision.
We maintain an ongoing dialogue with southern African partner organisations on the direction and planning of education programmes and projects. Continuing to develop new and distinctive responses to meet the need for education and training is central to our ethos and we're exploring ways of developing partnerships with innovative and effective projects and programmes working in southern Africa.
