Verification Mission 2019

In November 2019, I traveled to Malawi on a verification trip, to assure the program is working as intended. It is hard to imagine anyone taking your donations from the hands of needy students, but nevertheless we operate with the assumption that our money will be targeted and we work to remove and verify against all risks.

One of the main risks we have identified is whether we are reaching the truly needy students. We gather a lot of in depth information on their backgrounds, what their homes are made of, if their parents are alive, what they do for a living and more. Is that information correct or are we being tricked into funding a better off student? We have rigorous processes to verify that is not the case. We take a random square root sample of all our current students in school and we visit their homes. We cross check the situation we find with the information we have on file and confirm the students really are those in need. This is hard and time intensive work and we have found over the years that many other organisations do not invest in this level of assurance rigor.

So with 73 scholarships funded, we set off to visit the homes of 8 students currently in school, and visited the home village of a further alumni who has already graduated and is working as a teacher. We used 2 different techniques, on one occasion collecting the students from school and travelling with them to their homes, and on another, navigating ourselves to their homes using the contact information we have in our databases.

It was with mixed emotions that we found in all cases our students come from extremely needy backgrounds. On the one hand we were satisfied to find that our processes are working, we are targeting the most needy of students. On the other hand, it was difficult to experience and understand the challenges our scholars and their families face.

In all cases the scholars came from remote rural areas, living in homes made from mud bricks and mostly grass roofs. I did not have the remotest doubt that without our help our scholars would not be able to afford to go to school. Yet they were all bright young boys and girls, full of potential, and many of them have grades and character that fills you with belief about what their future holds.

In one case, we could not leave without doing something about the situation we found. Clara´s mum lives alone in a derelict mud hut with no roof and a sack for a door. Vulnerable to local men, no land to grow food, she frequently goes to sleep on an empty stomach. In this case we had to act and paid for a roof and secure door to be constructed before we left.

So this trip left me with a heavy heart on the one hand, but on the other, pride and confidence that our systems and processes our working and your donations are reaching those truly in need.

Another Side of the World

Malawi is a truly beautiful country, its known as “the warm heart of Africa” and this is not just a strapline, it´s something you feel in the villages and in day to day life. But this saying, and the warm smiles that you find across the country, hide the truth of how tough life can be for some living here. At Bright Sparks we aim to break the cycle of severe poverty through the best education available, so we target the brightest boys and girls from the toughest backgrounds, and we support them at the best government schools in the country. Our aim is that they realize their fullest potential and we take on the barriers to them achieving it, from school fees, to money for additional needs, to mentoring and support on the journey.

Of the 36 students we are currently supporting:

3 are full orphans and 16 have lost one of their parents

25 come from a subsistence farming background

24 live in mud built huts with grass roofs

23 came 1st in their school in their Public School Leaving Certificate Examinations at the end of primary school, and 33 came in the top 5

The images below are taken from one of the villages where one of our Bright Sparks scholars is from. 

Patrick Chimzimu as a yound boy before his Bright Sparks Scholarship. Patrick is now a chartered accountant and works on Bright Sparks Malawi Management Team

Where our journey begins

Subsistence living

Typical Malawian village 

Collecting water

It´s a long road, but Bright Sparks is committed to the journey

The First Spark

I´m standing at the front of a classroom packed with young Malawians, 2 to a desk, in their first year of Secondary School. It’s a boarding school with boys from all around the country. They are all looking at me, probably expecting that I know how to teach. I´ll not let on. I´m filling time, wondering where on earth the teacher is that I´m supposed to be observing. I guess he´s not coming. Its late 2004, and what I am unaware of is that Bright Sparks is about to begin. 

I am looking down at the 60+ names on the list of students I am supposed to be teaching, wondering why some of them aren´t here. Especially a couple of really bright ones, I can see their incredible exam results on the tattered dusty piece of paper I´ve been given.

“They´re not here sir, they´ve been sent home, they´re not coming back”.

A few days later I get a letter, hand delivered to my little mud brick home in the teachers housing area. It’s one of my students asking for help to pay his school fees so he doesn´t get sent home too. What do I do? I am living on a shoestring in Africa. Its bugging me that these bright young boys aren´t getting the chances I got. Just the chance to enjoy school and see what you can make of yourself. The first spark was ignited.

Set off to see the headmaster. Find out just how little fees are for a great education here, at one of the best national schools in the country. Email friends. Money coming in. Add it up, realize we can pay for 8 students. Back to the headmaster. Exam performance rankings in one hand, bursar´s list of missed fee payments in the other. Pick the brightest. Messages go out to the boys, some still in school, some back home in their village. Gather the boys, tell them friends from afar are going to pay their school fees. Huge smiles. Then tell them these new friends won´t leave them until they graduate from secondary school. Unforgettable moments. Write a contract, get the head and the students to sign it. Ask an Australian teacher to check the boys are not sent home once I´m gone. Bright Sparks is born.

Planning Bright Sparks Trust

10 years later to the day, I return to Malawi for the third time. As I exit the airport, a Doctor and Chartered Accountant are running towards me and embrace me and don´t let go. One of these young men was one of the boys who had been sent home back in 2004, a full orphan, no hope left. The other had been looking at me 10 years ago thinking I knew how to teach. They had come from the toughest corners of one of the poorest countries in the world, and here they were, professional and fine young men with a bright future. We left the airport together, the Bright Sparks Malawi Management Team. In the next 3 weeks we developed and signed Memorandums of Understanding with 3 of the best national schools in the country, we designed a process to identify the brightest children from the poorest backgrounds, we interviewed and selected 13 new Bright Sparks, we wrote our Operations Manual, we developed and signed Student Contracts so the students knew what support they had and what effort and performance we expected. We sat around camp fires under Baobab trees and agreed how this would work. We would work as volunteers. Our thanks to those that had provided us each with our education was to work to give others the opportunity we had enjoyed. We would focus on the neediest and the brightest. We spent many days and nights at Patrick´s village. I saw the changes that had happened as a result of Patrick´s career success. I saw the fertilizer stocks, the surplus foodstuffs, the old grass roofs replaced with shiny metal ones. We dreamed of how many children Bright Sparks could help, the many new friends we would find to support our cause, and the better Malawi that would come from having Bright Sparks in positions of influence in the future. It had taken us a decade, Bright Sparks was finally ready to grow.

Alastair Child - Founder and Director, Bright Sparks Trust