PATRIZIA School Yaoundé
The PATRIZIA Foundation built the PATRIZIA School Yaoundé in 2016 together with the Pallottines as their partner organisation in Yaoundé. The city is the capital of the Central African country of Cameroon and with around 2.5 million inhabitants the largest city in the country.
The secondary school with 21 classrooms is directly connected to a kindergarten, a primary school and the parish of the Pallottines.
Every year, the school enables 600 children in Yaoundé to continue their schooling after primary school. This does not at all go without saying in Cameroon: Merely less than half of all primary school graduates in the Central African country have access to a secondary school.
The PATRIZIA School Yaoundé’s funding partner is the business law firm “Sonntag & Partner”.
“When we enable 600 children to attend school, the voluntary work of the foundation fills me with particular pride.”
Andreas Menke
Patron of the PATRIZIA School Yaoundé
Ready for the Future
The PATRIZIA School Yaoundé wants to become a pioneer in the field of digital education and thus equip itself for the future. A first step in this direction was the “Ready for digital Learning” training for local teachers. This is based on the adaptive concept of Essence of Learning (EoL), a pedagogical approach that enables particularly efficient child-centered learning. The method is based on the child’s development and promotes self-active learning. This first measure ensured that the school now wants to implement further projects in order to be able to provide high-quality education.
A new playground
In April 2023, eight PATRIZIA SE employees flew to Yaoundé as part of the first corporate volunteering project outside Germany. There, together with partners, they transformed the playground on the school grounds into a natural and age-appropriate place for the primary school pupils. Activity and play are particularly important at this age, as they can promote physical development and the growth of social skills. Thus, the idea of building a playground fits well with the child-centered approach Essence of Learning used at the school.
More information about the project, the team and a diary that accompanied the playground construction can be found here.
If you also want to implement such a corporate volunteering project, feel free to take a look here.
Much-needed help
Life at PATRIZIA School Yaoundé – with its 600 pupils and 65 teachers, not to mention other staff members – came to a screeching halt when COVID-19 hit. To help the school return to normality as soon as possible, it received money from the Corona Fund Education Healthcare. These funds were invested in much-needed renovations to sanitary facilities, new masks, disinfectant and medical supplies for a recently erected infirmary. A full-time nurse is also now a member of the establishment. But first of all, the school needed help with producing learning materials and supplying pupils at home. In a country where less than half of all primary schoolchildren have the option of moving up to a secondary school, education means the world to children and their parents. The plan in the long term is to set up a multimedia room at the school.
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Yva´s Story of Change
Iva is one of 800 children that attend the school in Yaoundé. The lively girl is particularly fond of mathematics. At the PATRIZIA School Yaoundé she can pursue her mathematical talents.
6 x 8 = ? Sure, that makes 48. Yva only needs to take a quick look at the numbers when multiplying. She already has the solution. Her joy with numbers also infects her classmates. They also come to her for help and have voted Yva for class representative.
So there seems to be a bright future ahead for her as an accountant or banker.