Ten-year-old Blessing had already stopped counting the days since she last sat in a classroom. She spent her mornings helping her mother sell pepper soup ingredients by the roadside in Surulere, and somewhere along the way, “one day” had quietly become “no day at all.”
That changed the moment our team walked into her community.
A Community, A Clipboard, and a Mission
This week, the IA-Foundation team travelled to Surulere to kick off the 2026/27 Bursary Recruitment Process, one of the most important parts of our work all year. It is the stage where we move from talking about out-of-school children as a statistic to meeting them as individuals, by name, by story, by circumstance.
Surulere is not short on children who deserve a classroom. It is short on the systems that get them there. So our team set up, spoke with parents and guardians, and began the careful work of identifying children who are ready  and waiting for the chance to go back to school.
Why This Process Matters More Than It Looks
Recruitment day does not look dramatic. There is no stage, no confetti. Just tables, forms, and conversations. But underneath that simplicity is a rigorous process designed to make sure our bursary support reaches the children who need it most:
- Community engagement — working with local leaders and parents to spread the word and build trust
- Household verification— understanding each family’s circumstances to prioritise genuine need
- Child interviews — giving children a voice in a process that’s ultimately about their future
- Documentation— the unglamorous paperwork that turns a promise into a funded school place
For Blessing, it meant sitting across from a member of our team, answering questions about school, about home, about what she wanted to be one day. For us, it meant one more child moving from “out-of-school” to “on our list.”
The Bigger Picture
Every recruitment drive like this feeds directly into IA-Foundation’s core mission: getting out-of-school children back into quality education, one community at a time. Surulere joins a growing list of communities where we have done this work, and every visit teaches us something new about the barriers families face and the resilience they carry anyway.
The 2026/27 bursary cycle will support children like Blessing with tuition, books, uniforms, and the kind of consistent backing that turns “maybe someday” into “this September.”
How You Can Be Part of This
Recruitment is just the first step. The real work funding, mentoring, and walking with these children through a full academic year is where our supporters come in.
If you would like to sponsor a child, support the bursary fund, or simply learn more about how the process works, [visit our child sponsorship portal] www.ia-foundation.org or reach out to our team directly.
Blessing does not know it yet, but the pepper soup mornings might soon share space with homework evenings. That is the kind of change that starts with a clipboard in Surulere and continues with you.
