Home Page

Welcome to Bekha.org, owned and operated by the Central Highlands Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to improving the educational opportunities of children in Ethiopia.

Central Highlands Foundation is a 501(c)3 non-profit corporation established to provide infrastructure and educational resource assistance to rural communities in Southern Ethiopia. We are recently finished constructing a primary school (pictures of the building and some of its students provided below), comprised of grades 1 through 8, in the village of Bale, Southern Nations region, approximately 300 miles southwest of the capital, Addis Ababa. Bale is a farming community of roughly 10,000 people with no access to a primary school. Previously, in order to provide even a semblance of education for their children, some local parents organized for classes to be held in the open air or in dilapidated buildings and hired a teacher with less than a high school education. Originally thought to be able to educate a thousand students, the school is now full staffed with twenty-six teachers and is now serving a population of over two thousand students.

Aside from the lack of schools in the country, an equally serious challenge to the educational experience is the near total absence of books and other resource materials in schools throughout the country. Text books are virtually non-existent. Each day in every classroom in the country the teacher will post the daily lessons on the blackboard and the students are expected to copy this into their notebooks. This then becomes the sole reference source for their entire school career. Most schools do not even have a dictionary; let alone maps, encyclopedias or text books. One kindergarten we visited had one childrens book for a class of 50 students which they simply read over and over.

One simple story highlights the committment to education that most Ethiopians maintain. Last year a school was being built in a small village which previously had none. The local people were asked to help in the clearing of the site and in construction of the foundation. A woman who was 6 months pregnant and who had a 2 year old strapped to her back was observed picking up rocks and moving them from the site. When told that she did not need to participate said, "but how can I send my children to school if I don't help in building it?"

The literacy rate in Ethiopia is currently just under 40%. The school age population is estimated to be 15 million children, 40% of whom do not attend school, either because of economic or social factors or because no school is available. 60% of children presently attending school will not progress past the 4th grade and an even smaller number of females will reach this level. While the availability of primary schools in large cities and moderate size towns is encouraging, this is far from the case in many rural areas, especially in the south of the country. For millions of children the nearest school may be 10 or 20 miles away. It is not unusual for children in rural areas to walk 4 or 5 miles to school, often times after doing their morning chores. For those children who are able to attend school, class sizes most likely will be from 80 to 100 students. Many schools are forced to have a split schedule, morning and afternoon sessions, in order to accommodate the largest number of students possible.

Through supporting the spread of education in Ethiopia we believe we can help Ethiopians empower themselves to lift their communities out of the cycle of poverty and create a sustainable and more prosperous future. We also believe that to whom much is given, much is expected, and we cannot achieve our vision without your help. Please take the time to look through our site and see how you can directly affect the lives of children in one of Africa's poorest nations.