Education for a Better Future
Educare
How it all began
How it all began… the Story of Jean and Tony
Throughout their professional lives, buzzing Cape Town was home base for Jean-Marie and Tony Robertson. Tony having a career as a Civil Engineer, Jean as a Personal Trainer. They’ve always loved to travel, and the Wild Coast had often been their destination.
Call it fate, karma, kismet it was on one of these trips that they 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 at this lovely spot?

In the beginning, Jean worked as an assistant teacher for English literacy at the local Mpame Junior Secondary school but after a year realised that the focus of her working with young students lay elsewhere. The point of no return came as a proposal by the local chief when she offered some semi-finished buildings for completion and further use as pre-schools. Jean and Tony took the plunge. Supported by friends from South Africa and overseas as well as a generous sponsor at that time, they started to build the first creche, then another.
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. Money has always been the issue. 
 
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 pedagogic toys to spur the curiosity of the kids. With very positive, if not astonishing, results.

After close to ten years of developing and building this preschool project, Jean and Tony are thinking of retiring, turning Educare into an independent sustainable project.
Question for Jean? 
What future goals do you have for Educare Mpame
The reply came without further ado:
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 manager
Train teachers
Become financially secure
After almost 25 years of building a life together, Jean and Tony look forward to seeing Educare, their most important lives’ achievement, as an independent, self-sufficient project for many generations to come.
Become a sponsor of Educare – sponsor a child –
become a stepping stone
THANK YOU!
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.
