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Child parliamentarians Honourable Elton Phiri and Raymond Gatsi

Bornwise Mtonzi Cool Lifestyle Reporter
The Child Parliamentarians have come up with a project, Providing Education with General Assurance Trans-Fund for Scholars (PE-GATS), meant to assist the less privileged students with fees. PE-GATS is running under the theme “Celebrating 25 years” after the adoption of the African Union’s Children’s Charter, “Accelerating our collective effects to end child marriages in Africa”.

The programme is the brainchild of the Junior ministers Raymond Gatsi and Elton Phiri. In an interview with Cool Lifestyle, Raymond Gatsi the Child Minister of the Ministry of Higher and Tertiary Education, Science and Technology Development said the project will be rolled out soon.

“This project is mainly concerned about the school drop outs, orphans and vulnerable children and our goal is to help them, they should not suffer because their parents can’t afford to pay their school fees,” said Raymond Gatsi. He further said the project will also cater for those children who fall through the net provided by the Basic Education Assistance Module (BEAM) programme.

Honourable Elton Phiri said they wish to engage in a business that will help them to raise money to help these children. “We want to venture in businesses that will help us to raise money, we also hope to find sponsors and well wishers to help us to come up with enough capital to start a small business that will enable us to start generating income so that we can start to pay fees for these vulnerable children,” he said.

To show their concern and commitment the young parliamentarians held an awareness campaign in Kambuzuma in earlier this month and managed to gather a large number of children who turned up to air their views. One of the beneficiaries of this programme is Monalisa Gatsi who returned to school with the help of Chipo Tasaranarwo who provided with the whole set of uniform and Portifa Mwendeza who pledged to pay for her fees until she completes her high school course.

The junior parliamentarians say that they determined to make a lasting difference during their term with the 23 session of the Children’s Parliament and Cool Lifestyle is fully behind them.