School Infrastructure Development (SID) Project

“Building for True Christian Education”

The School Infrastructure Development (SID) Project aims to establish Adventist Christian schools/institutions in remote places in Africa as centres of influence for implementing true Christian education. 

 

The educational work of the Seventh-day Adventists began with home schools, as was exemplified in the first church school in 1853 at Bucks Bridge, New York. Homeschooling has remained an integral part of Adventist Christian education to date, especially in countries where homeschooling is legal, such as the US. 

 

However, not all countries are blessed with the privilege of homeschooling and parents are often compelled by law to send their children to a normal/public school. EG White states that “In these countries, in localities where there is a church, schools should be established.” She admonishes Adventists to “Work as if you were working for your life to save the children from being drowned in the polluting, corrupting influences of the world.” (Testimony for the Churches, vol 9, p. 199.1)

 

This inspired counsel provided the impetus for the SID Project through which FORT Education Africa endeavors to “establish schools after the Madison order,” schools that “not only educate in the knowledge of the Scriptures but … gives practical training that fits the student to go forth as a self-supporting missionary to the field to which he is called,” schools in which learners will obtain “valuable education for usefulness in missionary fields.” Schools in which learners, in their student days are “taught how to build, simply and substantially, how to cultivate the land and care for the injured. This training for medical-missionary work is one of the grandest objects for which any school can be established.” (5MR, 280 par 1).

 

Under the SID Project, FORT Education Africa will collaborate with like-minded donors and organizations to improve the educational infrastructure of Christ-centered schools, establish vocational training centres as well as teaching and referral Adventist mission hospitals as centres of true education in remote places in Africa.

A Pilot SID Project in Kenya

Nasarine School Complex Building Project

Nasarine Junior School (NJS) was founded about 10 years ago by a Kenyan Adventist couple who envisioned an early childhood education (ECE) center to provide quality Adventist Christian education to needy children within their rural vicinity in Western Kenya. The couple secured a ten-year lease on an old village property which they modestly renovated to host the NASARINE JUNIOR SCHOOL. In February 2014, the school admitted its first cohort of eight needy children. 

 

With a current enrolment of almost 300 children, the meagre structures at the leased property are under immense pressure prompting the need for a multi-phase building and expansion strategy that has become FORT Education Africa’s inaugural SID Project.  The first phase will be promulgated by the TEENS for KIDS Mission Trip in February 2025.