Educare
How it all began
Our story...
Throughout our professional lives, buzzing Cape Town was home base for us, Jean-Marie and Tony Robertson. Tony having a career as a Civil Engineer, I as a Personal Trainer. We've always loved to travel, and the Wild Coast had often been our destination. I have been involved in volunteer work in Cape Town specifically teaching early literacy.
It was on one of these trips that we came into contact with teachers from a local school in Mpame. There was no preschool yet. Initially helping with donating school materials and toys, the contact was intensified over the years. In 2016 the idea manifested itself:
 Why not retire to Mpame and help uplift the rural community, focussing on preschool education?
​
Initially we rented a huge round hut from a family in Mpame located in their homestead. The views were magnificent but life was not without challenges. We had no indoor plumbing or electricity and had to make use of an outside pit toilet. Medical care, shopping, banking and other logistics are still a challenge as we live more than 4 hours away from a reasonable city. We made do but eventually built a shower block and flushing toilet as well as rigging up some indoor cold water plumbing. In 2022 we managed to build our own beautiful small home. We have a lovely veggie garden and grow a variety of veggies for eating.
​
Apart from the creches, we have built a very strong bond with a group of neighbouring kids that runs around in a little pack, visiting us everyday. I try to expose them to many different experiences that would other wise not have been possible for them. They visit us everyday and we bake and cook together. On weekends we love to go swimming and picnicking at the rock pools close by.
​
When we arrived in Mpame we soon realised that almost 90% of the village was illiterate.There is no high school in the village and kids have to travel far to attend one. There is also a 95% unemployment rate and people mostly rely on government grants.


In the beginning, I worked as an assistant teacher for English literacy at the local Mpame Junior Secondary school but after a year realised that the focus of my working with young students lay elsewhere. We seized a key opportunity when the local chief suggested finishing the semi-built preschool buildings. With support from friends and a generous sponsor, we confidently built two new ECDC's, securing a brighter future for the community's children.
In 2019, Educare Mpame was established as an NPO (non-profit organization) and became a fixture in the community. At present, there are 53 children in the creches ‘Little Flower’ and ‘Sunshine’. The monthly running costs add up to about 20,000 ZAR, and without additional funds, the rising demand cannot be met. 
 
In May 2021, the support group ‘Bildungsfoerderung Transkei’ was established in Germany. Situated in Bonn, the former German Capital, donations can be made in Euro currency. www.transkei.org.
The quite active support group also contacted the Senior Expert Service (SES) and applied for assistance. As luck would have it, Nicola, a retired school teacher, introduced the mixed Montessori-Method at Educare: Teaching playfully, with lots of colours and educational toys to spur the curiosity of the kids. With very positive, if not astonishing, results.

We supply our kids with one cooked meal every day. It will often be the only meal these kids might have a day. Realising that some kids did not have anything to eat before going to school, we have also introduced a smoothie with fortified instant porridge on their arrival at school.
After close to six years of developing and building this preschool project, we are thinking of retiring, turning Educare into an independent sustainable project.
​
We have seen the impact Educare Mpame has made in our very remote community. Mainly in parents and children taking their education more seriously, going to school regularly and looking towards better schooling opportunities after leaving the creches. We are also involved in other community projects, supplying easier access to watering points and transport of this water by using hippo rollers. Following our example and having easier access to water more people are now also establishing veggie gardens where they previously traditionally only planted maize during the rainy season.
​
OUR GOALS FOR THE FUTURE:
​
* Build an additional classroom for each creche
* Build accommodations for volunteers, tourists/hikers, and campers to generate income
* Open more needed preschools in the area
* Take steps to ensure sustainability
* Employ a full time manager
* Train our teachers
* Become financially secure
We look forward to seeing Educare, as an independent, self-sufficient project for many generations to come.
Become a sponsor of Educare – sponsor a child –
become a stepping stone to a brighter future for our children.
​​​​​​​
​
​
​
OUR APPROACH
Language of Learning and Teaching
Our preschool is multilingual. Education in rural governments schools is only in isiXhosa. Furthermore schools in Mpame teaches only up to grade 9. After this, parents need to send their children to out-of-town schools, only if they have the funds. Here they arrive with no English and therefore the failure rate is about 90%. We teach in both English and isiXhosa to give these children a better chance to of making a success at this transition.
Excellent Foundation
We wish to provide our community's children with a solid foundation in education. Where there had been no preschool education before, we now aim to prepare our learners to be at the mainstream school entrance level when they leave our preschool.
What we Teach
As at every preschool, we teach numeracy and literacy. But in a very rural community it is also necessary for us to teach our learners to respect each other, their teachers, their parents and the environment. We teach good manners such as 'please' and 'thank you'. We teach them not to litter. We teach them not to hit each other and to treat their animals well. These basics seem normal to us, but are not always the norm in all cultures.
Community Involvement
We wish to involve the local community as much as possible. We have the full support of the local headman and his council. Sunshine and Little Flower each employs a teacher and a cook from the local community.
Meals
We currently serve one cooked meal a day. Our menu has grown and we now serve hot maize meal porridge, samp and beans, pap and spinach and cooked rice with soya mince. Every day we include veggies from our wonderful veggie gardens. We also serve a glass of juice after play time. This is often the only cooked meal our learners will receive in a day. .
Including the Parents
In rural communities, parents often place all responsibility for their children's education on the teachers. Most parents here have unbelievable survival skills and intuition, but not much formal education. We want to get our parents involved in this process and therefore we hold parents workshops where we teach them strategies for getting involved at home, Such as telling their children bedtime stories and reinforcing the principles we teach at school.
