OVER E500K FOR BUSHFIRE SCHOOLS FEST

MALKERNS – UNICEF and the European Union (EU) have pumped in an over E500 000 sponsorship for the upcoming 16th edition of the EU Bushfire Schools Festival.

The EU Bushfifire Schools’ Festival works towards providing sustainable access to the arts and developing a unique platform of creative expression and dialogue for Eswatini youth.
The festival was created to counter the lack of a formal arts curriculum in public schools of Eswatini by presenting creative performances, workshops, educational seminars, and interactive outreach programmes for participants from primary, high schools as well as teachers and education facilitators throughout the country. To date, the schools’ festival has hosted close to 9 000 students, 600 teachers, and over 60 facilitators since 2012. Yesterday the EU and United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) continued to stand with the schools festival programme by sponsoring it with over E500 000. The European Union (EU) sponsored the festival with lucrative sponsorship worth E452 000 00. On the other hand, UNICEF pledged E129 000 00 to sponsor the youth festival. EU Ambassador to Eswatini Dessislava Choumelova said with this sponsorship they aim to support, facilitate, and develop arts education in Eswatini as a means for youth to actively participate in social development issues.

Developing

“It is even a bigger joy to reach this milestone with our partners Bushfire and UNICEF. Our common goal of developing and growing the arts education in the country continues to prevail even this year. It is so beautiful that we will be having the event during Africa day on May 25th. “I cannot agree more that we have all understood the importance of education and skills, when we speak about skills we often forget the skills related to arts and the creative industries yet these are paramount to skills development,” the ambassador said. “The festival aligns with the EU’s social pillars, and is dedicated to supporting projects designed for youth organisations or groups of young people, with a focus on non-formal learning, such as youth exchanges, opportunities for volunteering, training, and networking opportunities for youth workers, cooperation for innovation in youth work, as well as projects to engage young people in a structured dialogue, particularly around environmental sustainability, inclusive creative arts, sustainable livelihoods, and migration toward digital innovations.

“The schools open day will have a blended programme that not only advances and integrates the EU’s mandate, but also ensures participatory activities with lasting positive effects on the participants. A minimum of 30 schools across the country’s four regions will participate in the festival. These schools are from a mix of rural and urban settings and will bring up to 600 pupils and teachers combined to attend,” added Choumelova. UNICEF Deputy Representative Afshin Parsi said as an organisation, they wish to see the education preparing children for the future. “When we think about education we often think about the classroom as well as the basic areas of knowledge like Science, reading, writing and Mathematics. Education is supposed to prepare children lives for today and for tomorrow and in their future life they need to be creative, they need to be able to function in a very complex world as the world is becoming more and more complex. We are all about seeing children getting the right skills as well as education that they all deserve, and we won’t rest until our objectives are met,” Parsi said.

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