Australia Funds New Classrooms for Savusavu’s St. Andrew’s Primary School

28th February, 2011

“It has been a long and big dream
To build a new school for our kids
But now it is complete
And our wishes fulfilled

We now all smile again
And not afraid of the rain
To sit on that hill and say
That it can come down any day”

For seven-year-old aspiring poet and Class Two student of St. Andrew’s Primary School in Savusavu, Salote Naikosowalu, the opening of a new classroom block means she no longer has to worry about the walls of her classroom coming down on her and her friends.

This follows the completion of new classrooms and the rehabilitation of other existing buildings at the school with Australian government funding through the Australian Agency for International Development, AusAID.

An entire block of classrooms at St Andrew’s was decommissioned after the floods and torrential rain in 2009 caused a landslide and uncovered the school’s foundation lying on a fault line. This meant the picturesque hill on which the school sits could come crashing down at any time.

AusAID provided FJ$80,000 to construct the new schoolrooms and rehabilitate existing buildings. It also provided an additional F$5,700 for school levies to assist parents who were struggling because of flood damage in the area.

Opening the new classroom block on Friday (25 September), AusAID’s First Secretary for development cooperation, Mr Timothy Gill, remarked: “It is widely acknowledged that education is one of the highest impact development investments, which reaps rewards not just for the individual child but for society as a whole.”

This sentiment was echoed by St. Andrew’s School Manager, Father Mateo Sovaki: “The parents of this school, the stakeholders being farmers, think that education is important in their lives. We want to say thank you to AusAID for lending us a helping hand so that we could build a few more classrooms so that our students could have a place that is conducive to study and learning”, he said.

Australia has provided substantial assistance to the education sector in Fiji, amounting to FJ$45 million from 2003 to 2009, to assist the Ministry of Education’s efforts to improve educational outcomes for children.

“We are currently tendering a contract for a new phase of support for education in Fiji – the Access to Quality Education program – which will see Australia invest a further FJ$45 million in education over the next five years,” Mr Gill said.

For Salote Naikosowalu, it was a dream come true: not only did she read her poem at the opening ceremony, but she also realised the truth of her words.

End