About Us

dfe is proud to be associated with EducAid, a small registered charitable Trust. It is staffed by a team of six volunteers in the UK and a growing number of Sierra Leoneans who, along with Miriam Mason Sesay, a British teacher, run operations in Sierra Leone.

EducAid promotes education among the underprivileged and refugee children of Sierra Leone. The trust believes that access to education promotes dignity and empowerment.

This ex-British colony ranks as the poorest country with data in the world, one in three babies die before they reach five years, and 70% of the population lives below the poverty line.

The country has recently emerged from ten years of brutal civil war, which captured the attention of the international community due to the extent of human rights abuses employed by all sides.

A high proportion of the population was killed and many of the survivors are only now returning to their places of origin. Many more have got stuck in Freetown, where they fled during the war. They have no means to return, nothing to return with or to, and live on the edge of society in the capital, accessing few or no facilities.

Miriam Mason-Sesay, a friend of EducAid, left her job as head of modern languages at a school in South London and moved to Freetown to open a Junior Secondary School in September 2000. Initially she rented a house and classes took place under the tree or on the back veranda.

In 2005 EducAid started their own building and now have well over 600 young people attending daily in a three-storey building built on Miriam’s mother-in-law’s vegetable patch. EducAid is funded entirely by individuals, churches, schools and foundations. Miriam does a 6-monthly fundraising tour of the various donor schools and churches, raising awareness, running assemblies and retreats.

If your school is interested in building lives with the EducAid schools please contact Lynda@furnitureforschools.co.uk All donations from UK taxpayers are eligible under the UK Government’s Gift Aid scheme and EducAid receives an additional 28p from the Government for each £1 donated in this way.

The Trustees cover UK overheads, so all donated money goes directly to projects in Sierra Leone. To give you an idea how far this will go, they estimate that it costs £120 to educate and provide school meals for one student for one year at the school in Freetown. To learn more about EducAid and how you can help, log onto www.educaid.org