In partnership with students and alumni from the Executive MBA Program at the MIT Sloan School of Management, the Virtue Foundation is working to help support the building of new Secondary School classrooms in Zoungou, Burkina Faso.

Located in the Ganzourgou Province in the center of the country, Zoungou is a primarily rural, agrarian village. In a community with approximately 9,900 school-aged children, only 6,600 are enrolled in school.

Though there are a variety of reasons for the discrepancy in school enrollment, a contributing factor is a lack of education infrastructure in the community.
Although there are 28 primary schools in the Zoungou Department, only one secondary school is available to local students. This means the school is chronically over capacity. The Zoungou Secondary School has only 14 classrooms to serve 818 enrolled students- 2 classrooms of which are located outdoors to accommodate student overflow.

Together with the EMBA students and alumni from MIT Sloan, Virtue Foundation hopes to address this gap and help support the community with additional educational infrastructure to better serve the community’s needs and accommodate more children into school. To do this, we have developed The Zoungou Secondary School Improvement Project with a two-step approach: Additional classrooms and facilities; and a library and solar powered lighting.

The first step is to supplement the existing Zoungou Secondary School with three additional classrooms and four toilets. These classrooms will replace the two makeshift, outdoor classrooms that currently accommodate student overflow. To expedite the delivery of these classrooms, a group of MIT ‘16 students have already collected funds and pre-financed the construction of these classrooms

The second step of the project, undertaken over the course of 2017, is to introduce solar powered lighting into the classrooms, as well as furnishing of a library.

Moving forward, Virtue Foundation hopes to facilitate the fundraising of the resources for both portions of this notable project. Education is one of Virtue Foundations main programming areas – we believe that education and knowledge empower people to lift communities out of poverty.

If you wish to contribute to any portion of the The Zoungou Secondary School Improvement Project and support the futures of the children of Zoungou, please do so at the Virtue Foundation donation page!

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