FURNISHING CLASSROOM SUSTAINABLY
WHY SEATPACK EXISTS
Over 95-Million African school children attend school without a place to sit or write properly, making physical classroom learning and literacy development difficult. This is largely due to the high unit price of traditional wooden classroom furniture (each desk/locker costs $80-$110 to furnish 2 children as per the regulations) (Tutu-desk, 2017).
With growing numbers of displaced/refugee school-children, building and delivering wooden classroom desks for remote schools has proven logistically difficult for governments and Impact budgets over the years, making furnished classrooms accessible to less rural schools (over 80% of primary school children are rural based in countries like Uganda alone).
We suggest rethinking how classrooms are composed so that learning is accessible to more remote and economically challenged school children.
Zetu Africa is a Uganda based social enterprise improving access to education and literacy by using School-Bags called SeatPacks to create Mobile Classrooms. SeatPacks are locally designed and produced child-school-bags that turn into mobile bamboo-classroom-chairs with portable writing surfaces to perform the functional duties of wooden classroom desks/lockers that majority schools cannot afford. SeatPacks also meet the new key requirement allowing safer-classrooms (2-meter distancing during lessons) for Covid19 spread-containment in classrooms.
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At 10% the cost of traditional wooden classroom desks, the SeatPack has been designed through 9 iterations with user feedback to suit the child and the classrooms indoors, and outdoors.
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Zetu Africa partners with Impact organizations and private companies to subsidize SeatPacks (sustainable mobile-classroom-furniture) for Primary school children in the poorest African communities, thereby improving access to basic education through sustainable Mobile-Classrooms.
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Zetu Africa also designs and sells commercial consumer products (currently Backpacks and Outdoor bamboo chairs) so as to sustain operations. Every commercial product we sell dedicates 10% of its profits to subsidizing a school SeatPack for a child.
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We are currently working to furnish 10million school children in Sub-Saharan Africa (currently Uganda) by 2030 to study this impact and share learnings with partners and other African countries.
