August 2025 news from The Mutende Project in Chingola, Zambia
We’re very pleased to report that the first classroom of the school expansion is complete! The foundations are in place for a new school block of five classrooms and toilets, but Bridge were able to release the funds for the first classroom to be completely finished and put to use. It’s a light and airy room behind the existing school block, and is already being used by a Grade 5 class.
Harold Mwenge Memorial Academy (HMMA) is proving to be a popular school in the local community because it gets such good results in the end-of-stage Grade 7 exams. For this reason places are in demand and there’s a need for extra capacity.
Bridge already has two thirds of the funding in place to complete the project, so thank you to all our generous donors who’ve already given. Construction is due to start on the remaining classrooms soon, and we’ll be fundraising for the remaining funds in our Big Give Campaign in early December - more details to come!
The School Manager with some of the HMMA students inside the new classroom
Some of the older children at the chimpanzee sanctuary
Our July visit to Mutende was a lot of fun as always, and very productive in terms of the project development.
One of our aims for this visit was to spend some quality time with the older children on the site. The younger ones often demand a lot of our time and attention so we wanted to make sure that the older ones got a look-in too.
We took the older children on a day trip to the Chimpanzee sanctuary, which was a great success. Beforehand one child said that it would be ‘the best day of their life’ 😂 - no pressure then!
It’s always good to see how the children are progressing when we visit. There are several young people coming up to their Grade 12 exams later in the year, which marks the end of their secondary school education. When these young people turn eighteen they’ll be moving away from the main Mutende site into the youth houses nearby. They’ll need to wait on their Grade 12 results before applying for further education or apprenticeships.
It’s amazing to think that there are several ‘graduates’ from Mutende who’ve been given opportunities for further education that they wouldn’t otherwise have had. One of these students, J, is due to finish his course in Real Estate later this year and will be looking for an internship. Two others, O and V, are waiting to take up places at Copperbelt University in Kitwe at the beginning of the next academic year. We’re looking at ways of providing more emotional support to these older students. It’s a challenge for any young person to be leaving home and even more so for these ones who don’t always have strong family connections. If you’d be interested in supporting any of these college students financially, then please let us know.