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Showing posts from April, 2017

Smile With Us School names house after Sylvia Blyden

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T he Smile With Us Primary School has named a house after Dr. Sylvia. O. Blyden, Sierra Leone’s minister of Social Welfare, Gender and Children Affairs. The new house, launched in time for sports day, is a sub-unit of the school, where each student is allocated to one house as a group or a team. The house is also using the moniker “Sia Kissi” and will be identified by its symbol color, pink. Sia Kissi house celebrates Dr. Blyden’s “exceptional work and contribution towards the empowerment and development of the entire Kissi kingdom, most especially for Kissi women,” the school authorities said. T he Smile With Us School is attached to an orphanage run by Mary Sesay, founder of the charity called Smile With Us Sierra Leone. The Smile With Us Orphanage is mainly for children who lost their parents during the Ebola virus epidemic in Sierra Leone in 2014, and other vulnerable children in the Koindu community of Kissi. Koindu is a town in Kailahun District in the Eastern Provi

Africa in the Human Development Index 2016

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S ierra Leone is one of more than thirty countries at the bottom of the Human Development Index released in March.  Along with neighboring Guinea and Liberia, Sierra Leone trailed in many components of the 2016 index such as life expectancy at birth, expected years of schooling, mean years of schooling, Gross National Income, and GNI per capita rank minus HDI rank.  L ife expectancy at birth is based on the number of years a newborn infant could expect to live if prevailing patterns of age-specific mortality rates at the time of birth stay the same throughout the infant’s life. Expected years of schooling refers to the number of years of schooling that a child of school entrance age can expect to receive if prevailing patterns of age-specific enrolment rates persist throughout the child’s life. Mean years of schooling is the average number of years of education received by people ages 25 and older, converted from education attainment levels using official durations of