Catholic Women Speak (CWS) is raising funds to support Bysee Preparatory School for Girls and Day Care Centre in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Our initial aim is to raise £300 per month during the Covid19 crisis, with a longer-term aim to establish a regular funding project. We are working to raise the first instalment of £300 to send to the school by the end of May. If this is successful, we'll start another funding appeal for June.

CWS member Gertrude Yema Jusufu runs the school, which was started by her mother. It comes under the auspices of St Peter the Rock Parish in Calaba town in Freetown. 

The school offers a wide range of educational and care facilities to women and girls, particularly orphans, girls from broken homes, and single mothers. It follows the formal school curriculum but extends this to develop the girls holistically and spiritually. The aim is to help them to recover a sense of personal dignity and self-esteem after the traumas of war and amidst the ongoing challenges of poverty, violence and abuse.

Gertrude struggles to raise sufficient funds to run the school, particularly during this global crisis caused by the Covid19 pandemic. Income comes exclusively from school fees, but she often has to borrow money at high interest rates when parents cannot afford to pay fees.

Our first aim is to provide support to enable Gertrude to continue to pay salaries while the school is closed because of the pandemic. After that, we plan to set in place a regular funding scheme to contribute to her work. The holistic education and support offered by Bysee School, which is rooted in the Catholic tradition but informed by the particular challenges of gender-based inequality and violence against women and girls, expresses the ideals and visions of our global Catholic Women Speak network. While we are not a fund-raising or charitable enterprise, we seek to express our commitment to the promotion of the full human dignity of women and girls by offering practical support to Gertrude.

To find out more about Catholic Women Speak, please visit our website. You can read more about Gertrude and the Bysee school project at this link .