Louise, Aline and Kapinga* are hardly household names in Australia. They are slightly better known in Malawi, where they live. Together with their two teachers at Dzaleka Secondary Community Day School, they received the prestigious Scientific and Technological Innovation Award at the Malawian National Schools Science Fair. Their project? The design and manufacture, from local materials, of an affordable lifejacket.
Sub-Saharan Malawi is blessed with abundant seasonal rainfall, many rivers and the impressive Lake Malawi, a 700km-long body of water that lies at the start of the African rift valley and forms much of Malawi's eastern border with Mozambique. Boats on the lake rarely carry life jackets. There have been several recent tragedies: a year ago a boat carrying 80 passengers and cargo capsized, with the loss of 25 people and tonnes of local agricultural produce being carried to market. In 2012, another boat carrying immigrants also capsized, drowning 47.
Life jackets cost $17, an amount well out of reach of most Malawians. Albert, one of the teachers, explained, 'There are a lot of accidents ... Some of the deaths can be preventable, only if people are equipped to swim or float to safety.'
Their life jacket uses 26 half litre plastic bottles, three square metres of polythene, and several metres of twine. It is big enough to provide buoyancy for people of at least 61kg body mass. 'The materials used in the making of the life jacket are easy to get,' Aline added. 'Plastic sheets are easy to get, and people can reuse empty water or soft drink plastic bottles. This is also good for the environment.'
In many ways this is an ordinary story: it could be about any group of creative, enterprising young people who are blessed with two committed educators in a good school.
But it is extraordinary in a number of ways, mostly for the fact that these students are in school in the first place. Louise, Aline and Kapinga are all refugees residing at the 35,000-people Dzaleka Refugee Camp. Worldwide, only 23 per cent of such refugee children reach secondary school (against an average of 84 per cent). That they do here is the result of an collaboration between and hard work by people from at least 20 different countries.
Cooperation of this kind is not uncommon. Groups such as Jesuit Mission, Caritas Australia, Catholic Mission Australia, Jesuit Refugee Service and a whole host of other agencies act as catalysts to bring ordinary Australians into touch with areas of