Sponsor a School

School sponsorship is a great way of supporting the long-term development of education in rural Africa. In return for your support, we will keep you updated on our work and the progress of the schools we work with.

By making a regular donation, you provide a steady and predictable flow of resources that allows us to plan our work effectively in support of rural schools and make the most of your gift. We use your donation to make schools a better place for children to learn and grow, through strengthening the skills of teachers, headteachers, communities and district education officials. This method is effective and leads to lasting change, but it takes time. That is why the regular support provided by school sponsors makes a real difference.

Sponsoring a school costs £21 per month – that’s less than 70p a day.

If you are an individual, you can increase your donation by 25% (that's £63 a year) at no extra cost to you by allowing us to reclaim the tax on your sponsorship. Simply fill in this Gift Aid form and send it to us when you sign up. We'll do the rest!

School Sponsors play an invaluable part in making Link’s work a success. Your donations give us the freedom to be creative, come up with innovative solutions and demonstrate them with our school, community and district partners. When we find something that works, we collaborate with government to scale this up to all the schools in a district, so we impact on the whole district rather than creating islands of excellence.

With your support Link can:

• Train teachers so that children learn more in the classroom.
• Train and support headteachers to be better managers, make best use of their resources and plan effectively.
• Support schools and communities to keep girls and marginalised children in school.
• Provide local language books so children can experience the joy of reading.
• Help communities to understand how their school should be performing, and support them to work to make the school better.
• Provide district education authorities with the tools, training and support to assess the performance of each school and to guide their long term plans for improvement.
• Support districts to work directly with schools to tackle health challenges such as sanitation, nutrition and HIV and AIDS.
• Influence national policy by sharing experience and good practice at the district level with the national government and other African countries.

Your support will enable us to assess how well schools are doing in every area from curriculum and teaching, to planning and management, and beyond. We do this in partnership with schools. Their communities and government using our innovative School Performance Review cycle. Through discussion of each school’s strengths and weaknesses we help the school to develop their own plan to make the school a better place to learn. We then work with the teachers, parents, community and the district education authorities, to help the school see that plan through. This approach means that the work is owned by the school and community themselves, making sure that the changes that we help bring about are sustainable and long-lasting.

This is long term work - which is why your regular support as a school sponsor is so valuable.

This regular stream of support is particularly valuable to us because it is predictable and long term.  Most of our project funding comes in three year cycles and some donors do not fund the full cost of a project, training for our African partners or the essential costs of running an office. Without these things Link would not be able to deliver our high quality projects which make a real difference to children’s lives. School Sponsorship allows us to fill these gaps and to provide continuous interventions over a longer period of time, so we can realistically measure change. This means that we can plan the support to schools, districts and communities more effectively, and make your money go further.

Yes, it does. Sponsoring a school gives you the chance to be part of a wider change for good. That’s because Link’s approach acknowledges that no school operates in isolation. To make lasting improvements in the quality of education in individual schools, change must involve the headteachers, teachers, parents, local community, district education offices and ultimately the national policy makers that surround and support each school.

So, by becoming a sponsor, you will also be investing in Link’s work with the local communities and district education authorities that monitor and support schools to improve. This work strengthening and supporting district authorities enables us to influence the quality of education provided by every school in the district.

When you sign up to become a sponsor we will send you a certificate and a detailed profile of one of the schools we support. This will contain photos and stories from children, parents and teachers at the school as well as information about the projects the school is involved in and how this has affected the school.

Sponsorship is designed to give you an insight into the everyday workings of a rural community, the challenges they face and the work we are doing to help overcome these challenges. We are committed to keeping School Sponsors up to date with our work and the impact it has on children, teachers and communities in Africa. To do this we will send you:

• A detailed profile of one of the schools we support. This will contain photos and stories from children, parents and teachers at the school as well as information about the projects the school is involved in and how these have affected the school. We will update this every 3 years so you can see the progress made by one of the schools we work with.
• An annual report on the state of education in the district and country where the school is located. This will help you to understand the context we are working in and to see how Link’s interventions fit into the overall objectives for improving education in the region.
• An annual report on Link’s projects in the district and country where the school is located. This will include feedback from the children, teachers and communities we work with, as well as assessments of the impact our work has had on education in the district. 

Instead of sending your donation to one school, we use it to develop and demonstrate innovative solutions that can impact on all the schools in a district. Individual schools are not aware that they have a Sponsor, but they all benefit from your donation through Link’s programmes. We will send you regular updates so you can see the impact of your donation in the district where your sponsored school is located. 

Link works with schools and their districts rather than individual children. We believe that this approach ensures a more sustainable contribution to the progress of the individual children within each school and to the schools themselves, as well as the parents, community members, teachers, and administrators that support education throughout the district. Sponsoring a school gives you the opportunity to see development in practice as Link works with your school to improve the quality of education within the community.

Our aim is to design and demonstrate innovative solutions to entrenched obstacles to quality education, such as lack of teacher training, low government funding and overcrowded classrooms. Then we work to integrate these solutions into government policy and practice. As our work evolves we work intensively with different sets of partner schools, districts and even countries.

The way we work enables us to reach as many schools and children as possible in a sustainable way, so we make the most of your donation. We might not always be able to send you updates on the same school, but we are committed to keeping School Sponsors up to date with our work and the impact it has on children, teachers and communities in Africa.