Nick Hewer: ‘School changes everything’
Going to school is a basic rite of passage every child expects in Britain. But there are 121 million school-age children around the world who are not in education. And that’s an alarming statistic that presenter Nick Hewer wants to do something about.
Nick started supporting the charity Street Child soon after they launched ten years ago and has since made three trips with them to Sierra Leone, where their work first started.
On each trip he’s learned more about their simple mission to help children in Sierra Leone get a basic schooling by giving small grants to help their family start a business so they can earn enough to pay school fees. The charity also takes care of children who have, through various circumstances, found themselves on the streets.
“Children typically leave home because their parents can’t provide for them and they find themselves living on scraps and sleeping outside,” says Nick. But Street Child picks them up and takes them back to their parents, often offering a grant that allows the family to open some kind of enterprise that would help them pay for their child to have a uniform and go to school.
Sometimes, they use the incentive of paying families to grow a crop and ask for half of that crop to sell on the market, which the charity then uses to pay the teachers of their child’s school.
“There’s a thing in Sierra Leone called the daily survivor which is the amount needed to get through a day – 80p,” says Nick. “The trouble is once people have that 80p they worry about tomorrow’s 80p. What we’re trying to do is get something going so they don’t have to worry about tomorrow because they’ve got a revenue stream from selling pans or sewing clothes or whatever.”
As part of the three trips Nick has made with the charity, he’s met countless families whose lives have been transformed by its work.
“I remember one girl who at the age of 11 was basically a street prostitute and by 13 she’d had a baby. Thankfully Street Child found her, took her back to her parents and now she’s happily in school,” says Nick. There are also thousands of Ebola orphans, forced to raise themselves – and their siblings – after their parents died from the disease that devastated this area. However, with Street Child’s help they’re now getting the education that will allow them to make a living in adulthood. Today, Street Child’s big focus is building or renovating 1,000 schools across Sierra Leone, a project that Nick has happily played his part in by adopting a school which he has sponsored in the name of his 12-year-old grandson, Freddie Hewer.
“I named it after Freddie as I wanted him to realise how lucky he is. When I told him about the school he was really pleased and looks forward to one day visiting it himself.” When Nick went to the school last year, he was delighted to see how happy the children were in their school uniforms, singing songs for him. Now, as patron of the charity, Nick hopes that Street Child can continue to transform lives. “What I like about Street Child is that it acts fast to solve problems and, as a small charity, it gets down to business.”