The Olico program is in its 2nd year of implementation at Awarenet and it is still going well. This year we recruited new grade 8 and 9 learners from surrounding high schools and we had many learners sign up at the beginning of the year. As the program began in mid January, we saw a large number of learners attending and we even encountered a space issue and had to outsource the venue. As the program continued, we started to see a drastic decline in attendance from grade 9 learners which saw a decrease from 15 to 5 learners. We had many interventions in place including meetings with relevant teachers and parents as well as changing attendance days to accommodate everyone. This did not help with the decrease in grade 9 learner attendance.
We then decided to approach a fellow NGO Ikamva Youth, which is located just 5 minutes away from Awarenet. iKamva is also in the after-school space with learners from grades 8-12 and was therefore the perfect organisation to collaborate with. A meeting was held between the two organisations and we decided to include 20 of the iKamva grade 9 learners in the Olico program. This saw both organisations benefiting, iKamva learners by being included in the Olico program and Awarenet by gaining both additional grade 9 learners as well as a bigger more convenient venue which has all the necessary resources to hold Olico sessions. We hope to have a long and fruitful relationship with iKamva and collaborate on more projects with them.