Uvira, March 2019 – From 18 February to 2 March 2019, CERC held four three-day training-of-trainers sessions in Uvira and in Luvungi, in the Ruzizi plain. Each session ended with a certificate ceremony.
The trainings were organised under Students Acting for Honesty, Integrity and Equality (SHINE), a project implemented by CERC with Integrity Action and funded by NORAD and Sida. SHINE supports Integrity Clubs in secondary schools, where students monitor their school's services and work with officials to fix the problems they find.
The sessions brought together 202 participants from 35 secondary schools:
- 70 teachers;
- 35 school principals;
- 97 Integrity Club leaders.
The aim was to prepare them to run Community Integrity Building sessions in their own schools. Through theoretical and practical exercises, they worked on teaching methods and on the key steps of the approach: choosing what to monitor, collecting evidence, reporting problems with the DevelopmentCheck tool and working with school officials and the community to solve them.
In January and February 2019, the school facilitators – educators appointed by principals to guide the clubs – were also trained in the anti-corruption legal framework, to make the clubs more interactive and visible.
Training trainers is how SHINE grows. In its first year, the teachers and club leaders trained in Uvira and Sange went on to train 240 other club members and more than 1,600 students in other schools. The 300 monitors they coached followed the services and infrastructure of 20 secondary schools worth more than US$1 million and reached a fix rate of 43%, against a target of 15%. Among club members, those who would report a suspicion of corruption to the authorities rose from 41% to 93%, and those willing to give a teacher a gift to improve their marks fell from 64% to 11%.
The method has changed lives. At Institut Itara in Luvungi, monitors found 70 to 90 students in classrooms built for 50; after their meetings with the school management, new classrooms were completed in October 2018. Yvette Rosalive Meucca, an Integrity Club leader, put it simply:
“The Integrity Club saved my life.”
Back in their schools, the 202 new trainers will run Community Integrity Building sessions with their clubs, helping students turn what they find into problems solved.
Stand with the young people of South Kivu: make a donation or become a supporter to help bring Integrity Clubs to more schools.
Read also: 120 teachers, principals and club leaders trained in Uvira and Sange