Scholarships Program

KnowledgeBeat offers full and partial scholarships to high performing students to attend secondary school. We focus our efforts on girls, and we place our recipients in the best boarding schools in Zambia. The girl’s scholarship program began in 2008 with the addition of a boy’s scholarship program approved in 2009. The scholarships include tuition, uniform, food, and housing fees and are available to youths enrolled in grades 7-9 who are eligible to attend secondary school in the following year. Offering scholarships creates opportunities for promising Zambians to become educated when poverty would otherwise force them to abandon their studies.

Eligible students complete a detailed written application and submit personal and academic references. Finalists undergo an extensive interview process with designated individuals from the Scholarship Selection Committee. The Scholarship Selection Committee reviews, discusses and awards the scholarships. The Selection Committee includes KnowledgeBeat team members and select individuals from outside the community. In 2008 KnowledgeBeat selected its first two scholarship recipients to attend Njase Girls Secondary School, Liness Nakanyika and Memory Mungenisa.

The recipients provide verbal and written reports on their progress at secondary school and submit their grades and performance scores to KnowledgeBeat, enabling us to continuously assess their progress and improve our support of the recipients. During each term, our Youth Program Manager visits the recipients to not only monitor their progress but provide support and encouragement.

Statistics continue to prove that educating young women in developing regions carries crucial benefits into future generations. Providing girls one extra year of education beyond the average boosts eventual wages by 10-20%. Infant mortality decreases by 8% for each year a woman stays in school - a statistic whose impact is even greater when you consider that a child born in a least developed country is 14 times more likely to die during the first 28 days of life than one born in an industrialized country. Educated mothers have families with better health and nutrition and their children stay in school longer.

These are just a few of the reasons why KnowledgeBeat puts such strong emphasis on advancing youth through the educational system. We look forward to providing a broader range of scholarship opportunities to both male and female students in the future with the goal to provide 1,000 scholarships by 2015.