The School| The Don McMath Foundation School |
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Founded by Anne McMath, the school is called The Don McMath Foundation, and is named after Anne’s late husband, Don, a teacher in Sussex until his death in 1991.
We believe it is the first and only completely free school in The Gambia; we provide the schooling, the books, the accompanying equipment, and a uniform.
 The school opened in January 2003 with just one class of 30 children; however, by 2004 we had reached the full capacity of the building we were renting and decided to build a new school. We were given a plot of land of approximately 2 acres by the Gambian Government. After about a year of dealing with the Gambian Bureaucracy we finally got all the paperwork sorted out and, after local men had cleared the site, we started building in December 2004. The clearing of the site was a priority as, in order to establish ownership, the plot had to have been cleared and a wall built around it within 12 months of receiving it.
All the building work was done by the families of the children at the school. The bricks were made by hand using sand and cement put into a mould and then left out in the sun to dry. Owing to there being no mains drainage in most of the Gambia, two huge cesspits for sewage were required and these had to be built before the main building work could be started. The team of parents worked extremely fast and, amazingly, managed to complete the main structure by 20th April 2005, a mere four months after commencement. The new school opened its doors in July 2005, with the official opening ceremony taking place on 28th November 2005 in front of the charity trustees and sponsors who had travelled to The Gambia to attend. With phase 2 complete the school was able to take 180 children between the ages of four and seven across six classes; however, by September 2006 we had again reached full capacity and were looking at implementing phase 3 of our long term goal of educating children up to the age of 17, at which point they may sit a Gambian further education entrance exam. Four further classrooms, a library, a toilet block and a teacher’s room were constructed in a second building on the site which opened in November 2007 and which increased our capacity to accommodate 300 children in total. As of June 2009 we are currently more than halfway through the process of building a new classroom block on the existing site for an Upper Basic School. This will consist of a building incorporating six classrooms, which will include amongst others, a Science room, an English room, a Domestic Science room and possibly a metal and wood workshop. The school will teach three years of secondary education, from ages 14 through to 17, with specialist teachers for Maths, English, Science, Social & Environment Studies as well as a range of other subjects. The Upper School is scheduled to open its doors in September 2010, taking those children that have completed Grade 6 and are working towards the Gambian National Exam. The money to run the school is raised through sponsorship. The sponsorship money allows us to include free school uniforms for the children. Cloth is bought at the local market and made into uniforms by a local lady, Fatou. We also employ a Gambian administrator and a Gambian night watchman. The estimated annual cost per child in the nursery and primary school is approximately £55, which includes the cost of renting the school, paying the teachers, supplying the uniforms and equipment, along with paying for electricity etc. On occasion throughout the accounting year incidental costs are incurred, for example when a child comes to school with no lunch or is wearing no shoes. Because of this we allocate £60 per child per year for ease of accounting. For the children in the Upper School the figure is likely to be between £80 and £100 per annum. Despite generous ongoing support from our existing sponsors, we are constantly looking for additional sponsors, particularly as the total costs involved in building the Upper School is in the region of £12,000 - £13,000, which has to be raised by April 2010.  Please help us achieve our goal by donating funds to our cause.
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