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• Educating Africa: Entrepreneurship
in Education Awards Announced
• Rising to the Challenge: Your Votes
See Teach A Man To Fish School Take 2nd Place
• Education That Pays For Itself 2008:
Commitments to Change
• Industry & Community: The Bolivian
School Making Agriculture Pay
Welcome to the December edition of the TeachAManToFish quarterly e-bulletin!
From giving and receiving awards, to conference commitments and school businesses on an industrial scale - welcome to another edition of the TeachAManToFish quarterly newsletter.
Season's greetings & a Happy New Year
to one and all!!!!
 Educating Africa: Entrepreneurship in Education Awards Announced
When it comes to making education widely available in the toughest of environments entrepreneurship has never been more needed than today – something clearly demonstrated by the winners of the Educating Africa Pan-African Awards for Entrepreneurship in Education 2008.
The top three award winners this year include an outstanding voluntourism initiative from Uganda, an Ethiopian enterprise offering pre-school education with a twist, and a Kenyan project helping schools earn money from honey. Alongside their awards, all three organizations were sponsored to attend our conference in South Africa last month where their contributions to shared learning taking place were highly valued.
To find out more about the work of top three prize winners, click here
You can also view a full list of awardees including country prizes and commendations, here.
Rising to the Challenge: Your Votes See Teach A Man To Fish School Take 2nd Place
“Agriculture School – Paraguay” wins 2nd prize in the BBC World Challenge 2008 awards.
 World Challenge is a global competition, now in its fourth year, that encourages, recognizes, and rewards enterprising initiatives making a real difference being made at the grass-roots level.
There’s really no better example of this than the Escuela Agricola San Francisco in Paraguay, run by our Latin America partner the Fundación Paraguaya.
Paraguay is one of the poorest countries in Latin America, yet the educational system does not teach children how to earn a living. This unique school incorporates life skills qualifications, alongside traditional academic modules - producing graduates able to go directly into well-paid work, or into further education.
Martin Burt and Nik Kafka, from Fundación Paraguaya and TeachAManToFish attended the ceremony in Holland to receive the prize of USD $10.000 which will make a valuable contribution to enhancing the students’ overall learning experience.
With a tiny home audience for BBC World programs in Paraguay, it’s your votes internationally that catapulted us into second place – so thanks from all of us here at TeachAManToFish!
 Education That Pays For Itself 2008: Commitments to Change
The second international TeachAManToFish conference “Education That Pays For Itself 2008 ” took place in South Africa during November, bringing more than 130 participants together from 23 countries in what turned out to be a truly inspirational event.
 With
so much time, energy and expense channeled into a couple of
days, once the dust’s settled and everyone’s back
home, how can we be sure we’re creating a real impact
and the momentum to take our work further?
This year we’re trying something new through the creation of a global commitment program. Sixty five conference participants have committed themselves and their organizations to bringing the benefits of sustainable education to 5.8 million young people around the world.
We’ll make these commitments available online in the near future, but in the mean time if you’re looking for a little inspiration yourself, why not watch our conference video, or have a read of our South Africa diary 2008.
Industry & Community: The Bolivian School Making Agriculture Pay
Generating enough income from school business activities to provide a free education to your students is a tough challenge - but one which Colonia Piraí in Bolivia has more than conquered. What’s more this school has achieved full financially self-sufficient through agricultural activities alone!
 The students come from poor rural backgrounds where typical family income is in the range of $200-$600 per year - for a household of up to 20 people! This makes the student's practical, 'learning by doing' education all the more crucial as they are quickly able to apply new farming techniques at home and help support their family while they study.
The school's two main income generating activities are the production of eggs and pork products, both of which operate on an industrial scale. These businesses provide employment for the local community, strengthen the school management’s entrepreneurial credentials, and deepen the schools understanding of local markets - both as an employer and vendor.
At school, the students spend the morning getting hands-on experience in all aspects of agribusiness, enhanced by classroom theory in the afternoon.
Central to each student's education is an entrepreneurial community project which they set up and develop throughout their three years at Colonia Piraí. These projects spread new ideas and innovative agricultural techniques among local farmers and adding value to the local economy.
Each year graduating students take the skills they learnt at Colonia Piraí and set up their own agricultural enterprise or are employed in agribusiness as technicians and middle managers. Some even go on to further study at university - an incredible achievement when you consider that without Colonia Piraí they wouldn’t have been able to even make it to high school!
Share Your Story
With Us
This is your newsletter.
By now you’ve hopefully got a pretty good idea of the
type of programs we’re interested in – entrepreneurial
schools in developing countries finding creative ways to generate
income to support their educational activities.
If you know of any institutions following
this approach with an interesting story to tell, send us an
email and we’ll try to include it in a future newsletter.
Don’t be shy about your good work.
Share your story with us - who knows what new opportunities
it might open up!
Write to: nik.kafka@teachamantofish.org.uk
Tell The
World – Take a Moment to Help Us Go Global
Scandalously there are still people out there who are unaware of
TeachAManToFish! Yet according
to mathematical geniuses, if you told just five people about
us, and they did the same thing, then within 14 steps the
whole world would have heard of us!
We've added a nice little feature
to our website that makes sending an email to a few friends
about us child's play. Someone's got to get the ball rolling,
why not you?
Go on, speak to the world – click
here!
Help Us Find Potential
Partners
Although the internet has created unrivalled
possibilities for agricultural schools across developing countries
to share their experiences, finding these schools and putting
them in contact with each other is no simple task.
If you have any connections with agricultural
schools that might be interested in our network please make
sure you get in touch!
Email: nicola.radford@teachamantofish.org.uk
Links
For free membership of our network
– visit www.teachamantofish.org.uk/joinournetwork.php
Make a donation online
– www.teachamantofish.org.uk/supportus/donate.php
See back issues of this newsletter
– visit www.teachamantofish.org.uk/bulletin/index.php
Don’t miss future newsletters
– www.teachamantofish.org.uk/bulletin/subscribe.php
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