Jamaican Rastafarian Development Community (JRDC)

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The Jamaican Rastafarian Development Community traces its roots to informal home schooling begun in 1975 by Brother Donald Leach for the English-speaking Rastafari repatriate community in Shashamane, Ethiopia, work that was formally registered as the Jamaican Rastafarian Development Community School only in 2002, twenty seven years later.

Shashamane itself carries particular significance for Rastafari: it is land Emperor Haile Selassie I granted for the repatriation of people of African descent, so a school built there serves a community whose presence on that land is itself an act tied directly to Rastafari belief and history, not simply a diaspora community that happened to settle nearby by circumstance.

The school serves both the English-speaking Rastafari repatriate community and local Ethiopian children in a non-English-speaking environment, a dual audience that reflects the wider Rastafari movement's history of building formal community and educational institutions in Jamaica since the mid twentieth century, now extended to the specific land its members repatriated to, and supported by the US-based Shashamane Foundation.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

JRDC's own 2012 annual report recorded over 500 students registered at its Kindergarten and Elementary School in Shashamane, including 125 in kindergarten, with 38 grade eight students graduating that year to continue their education, a level of detail that lets the school's 2012 scale be read precisely rather than estimated from a general description.

The school's supporting Shashamane Foundation states a more recent current registered population of 430 students and 29 staff, a smaller enrollment than the 2012 figure, and separately states that more than 2,000 students have graduated on to higher education since the school's formal registration in 2002, a cumulative figure spanning the school's full operating history rather than any single year.

Read together, the 2012 snapshot and the cumulative graduate count describe an institution that has educated a substantial population over two decades even as its year-to-year enrollment has fluctuated, still serving the Rastafari repatriate community its 1975 founding was built around, from a single home school to a registered institution.