The Herald

‘There is a school in Sierra Leone named after my pal’s dad. Here’s why...’

Long-held desire to help others has passed down from father to son

IN Campsie cemetery where the hills descend gently to embrace the dead, we gathered last week to bid farewell to Garth Heffernan. As he was being laid to rest, 4,700 miles away in Sierra Leone plans were being drawn up for a school that will bear his name. You probably won’t have heard of Garth Heffernan and here I must declare an interest. He was the father of one of my best friends and probably the first adult to engage with me in a grown-up manner about the intricate contradict­ions of life behind the old Iron Curtain.

Mr Heffernan was a senior executive in the old Scottish Developmen­t Agency where he’d been tasked with making deals with some of the Soviet Bloc countries to boost Scottish trade. Along the way, his recognised negotiatin­g skills and a gnarly Lanarkshir­e charm helped open up a measure of cautious, longterm cooperatio­n between the eastern Europeans and Scotland.

His success at both endeavours came to be recognised when he was awarded one of Bulgaria’s highest civilian honours by the country’s president.

Mr Heffernan had introduced the Bulgarian Department of Agricultur­e to farmers in Fife whose potatoes were producing a yield ten times more than Bulgarian ones. In return, the Scottish Developmen­t Agency were granted access to some coveted Bulgarian expertise in other areas of rural developmen­t.

His skills at doing business for Scotland in rough terrain were inherited by his son, Gary. After graduating from Strathclyd­e University’s pioneering Technology and Business Studies School, my friend rose to become a senior vicepresid­ent with Accenture, the global management specialist­s, with special responsibi­lity for Africa.

It was in this role that he began to witness at first-hand the raw deprivatio­n – eclipsing anything in our soft European imaginatio­ns – and felt moved to use his internatio­nal connection­s and management expertise in raising funds for targeted projects.

“I was introduced to Tom and Linda Dannatt who’d given up their successful careers in the City to devote all their energies to founding and establishi­ng Street Child, which seeks to address the plight of children in Africa’s poorest communitie­s. They had encountere­d challenges in partnering with the large charitable behemoths which receive the bulk of western government­s’ aid.

“My work with Accenture had given me access to the senior people in some of the world’s top 100 companies and so I was able to help. It was just the sort of project I felt could make a sustainabl­e difference in the lives of children who were being denied their sacred right to an education.”

Sierra Leone currently sits 12th in the World Health Organisati­on’s list of the world’s poorest nations. The bulk of the top ten are also on the African continent. Centuries of western greed and brutality had culminated in the 19th century Scramble for Africa. This was the obscene 80-year pillage of an entire continent and the enslavemen­t of its people by seven of the west’s richest powers as a means of feeding the Dark Satanic Mills of the Industrial Revolution.

Since then, western aid to these places in the wake of the instabilit­y and geopolitic­al chaos wrought by the west’s imperialis­m, has been conducted on a transactio­nal basis: to fulfil minimum internatio­nal obligation­s and always secondary to military and defence spending wherever the west’s perceived interests are threatened elsewhere.

“What we’re trying to do with Street Child,” said Gary, “is not simply to take children off the streets and into schools. It’s providing an entire service framework, delivered over several years, with the aim of growing these schools and then handing them back to their communitie­s.

“It’s not enough merely to hand them money; a little initial expertise and then to withdraw. We have a detailed strategy where we recruit teachers; lay down the curriculum under the guidance of local and trusted community leaders and then design the schools in sympathy with each community’s unique cultural and economic DNA.

“If we neglect the long-term viability of these schools and the potential of these children then we become trapped in a cycle of crisis, where the roots of instabilit­y and poverty become visible again just a few years after we told ourselves we’d discharged our moral obligation­s.”

The challenges in some of the 15 countries where Street Child is active are formidable. Yet, the numbers of children and their families whose lives are being transforme­d are embedding hope in what had been an endlessly depressing narrative.

They have reached more than one million children, including nearly half a million directly supported into education. They have also helped more than 150,000 adults through family business schemes and teacher training. More than 800 schools have been built or modernised to improve learning environmen­ts.

“You can’t begin to imagine what real wickedness and brute inhumanity looks like until you see hundreds of children in some areas of Sierra Leone missing limbs. This is the chief means of control by warlords and their death squads.”

Some of the challenges stem from an economic dilemma facing many African families. When children reach school age they’re of more value to their households by working to help their families scrape a meagre subsistenc­e.

“The purpose of much of our fund-raising,” says Gary, “is to provide families with an income by buying little plots of land they can farm or to provide seed money for mums and dads to set up modest local enterprise­s where they can make a living by utilising their creative skills. This then frees up their children to attend school. If done carefully and thoughtful­ly and with the knowledge and guidance of local people themselves we can make this transforma­tional and sustainabl­e over a long period.”

Thus far, Street Child has focused on building primary schools and creating a curriculum for them. The next stage is to embark on a programme of providing secondary schools. Among the first of these in Sierra Leone will bear the name of Garth Heffernan, former pupil of Our Lady’s High in Motherwell and proud Scot.

“The Scottish values of hard work, honesty, fairness and innovation which underpinne­d dad’s life and work will be embedded in the foundation­s of a school in Sierra Leone built in his honour,” says Gary.

Details of the work of Street Child and how to donate are here: https:// street-child.org

Hundreds of children have had limbs hacked off by warlords