Back in 2021, at the height of the Covid pandemic, a great partnership developed between one of our volunteers, Joanne, and Lisong, principal of Mary’s Little Lambs nursery and lower basic school in The Gambia.  Joanne owned and ran a nursery school in the UK and was involved in training nursery-school teachers, and the original plan was for her to go to The Gambia and work with Lisong to run training sessions for nursery teachers there.  However the pandemic intervened and the borders closed, so instead Joanne and Lisong worked together online, producing a detailed training manual and training materials for the new Gambia nursery curriculum.  Since then Joanne has been several times to The Gambia and has helped conduct the training for a large group of Gambian teachers – but at that time in 2021 no-one knew if and when it would be possible for face-to-face training to take place.

So as part of her online work Joanne produced a series of 10 Powerpoint presentations which could be sent to schools and used for remote training.  They were all based around learning through play – they covered aspects such as the daily routine, the learning environment and gave a whole range of ideas of how to encourage physical development, mathematical development, creative development and literary development in young children, all through the medium of play-based activities.

As soon as Mary’s Little Lambs reopened Lisong used these training materials with her staff, running weekly training sessions on a Friday afternoon.  She sent photos so we could see how the work was progressing, and when the borders reopened and Joanne was finally able to go to The Gambia she visited Mary’s Little Lambs where the teachers proudly showed her some of the resources they had made and the work the children had done.

Now fast forward to the start of 2026, when people and places started working with a new project at Amlougui village in Morocco.  This is a small, fairly remote mountain village where our new local partner, Ibrahim, has set up a number of initiatives to provide opportunities for the people of his village to enable them to make a living there and not have to move away to the cities.  There is a very small nursery school called the Amlougi Village Nursery, run by a dedicated young teacher, Salma.  Salma has a wonderful rapport with the young children she teaches – she has no formal teacher training but loves her work and is keen to learn ways of doing it better. 

We wanted to help, but were not currently working with a prospective volunteer with nursery school experience who could go to Amlougui to work alongside Salma.  But we did have Joanne’s resources.  I approached Joanne to see if she would mind if we used her resources with Salma, and she instantly agreed.  So over the last 3 months I have been doing an e-volunteer placement with Salma.  We meet for about an hour once a week – each week we use one of Joanne’s Powerpoint presentations as the basis for our discussions and talk about which activities would work best with her children.  During the week Salma always tries out at least one of the ideas we have discussed, and she always reports that the children loved them and asked to do more.

When I started working with Salma I asked her about her pupils and her lessons, and we talked about what she hoped to get out of the sessions.  At that time, she was worried that some children from the village were not coming to school – nursery school education is not compulsory and she worried that they were not coming because they didn’t find school interesting or fun.  As we approach the end of our time working together the thing we are both most pleased about is how much more enthusiastic the children now are about coming to school – and the numbers attending regularly have doubled!

As I prepared for each session I sometimes tweaked the presentations just a little to make them appropriate for Moroccan culture, and I occasionally added more examples of activities.  The ideas for these came from teachers and volunteers I have worked with at other projects supported by people and places volunteers, particularly work done back in 2015 for nursery age children in Eswatini and in 2018 in South Africa.  All this has emphasised that the needs of teachers and children around the world are really very similar and that the baton can be passed on, not just from one volunteer to the next in one country, but also from project to project in the different countries where we work.

If you have skills in nursery school education and would like to discuss the opportunities we can currently offer for volunteering in this field, please contact musufing@travel-peopleandplaces.co.uk