Educate a child from Kibagare Slum at St Martins

Greetings from St. Martin's School, Kibagare.

Thanks to your continued support, students, staff, and the community here at Kibagare have had a good and successful second term of the current school calendar year. In the term that has just ended, we have been lucky enough to host two groups of volunteers from the Tenth Revolution Group in May and the Friends of St Martins in July. A clear testament to our engagement with our donors in helping us achieve that which we have set out.

The volunteers helped in our Kitchen to serve the meals during the week and during the weekend feeding program; they helped run a fun with maths class, assessed our phase 1 and 2 solar project, helped run a hackathon for our students, held our first innovators workshop and dragons den for our students and school.

Inflation is still high, unemployment is still an issue for the young and the old in this community, and poverty and rising food costs are an everyday reality here in the slum. But even with these problems, we continue to do the best we can for the children and the community here and are appreciative of the support we have received and continue to receive.

On education,  Term 2 started well at the end of April, and the students have had daily classes, end-of-term and opener exams, and lots of extracurricular activities. The Second term was more of ball games: volleyball, soccer, handball, basketball, netball, and chess for both boys' and girls' teams in Primary School and Junior School at the Subcounty, regional, and national levels. We have had success this term with one of our teams placed 7th in Athletics, 3 of our students qualifying for the Nationals, and our girls' soccer team in the finals of the schools' competition.

On the School feeding and weekend feeding Program, inflation is still high, and the rains are still unreliable thanks to climate change; unemployment is still high, and many children still have no guarantee of meals. We have continued to feed our children during the time they are in school and during the weekends to address some of these challenges, and thanks to continued support, no child has missed out on a meal since our last update. Between 1400 and 1600 children attend our weekend feeding program from Kibagare slum and surrounding slums; in the last three months, we have served more than 15,000 meals during the weekend feeding program. During school days, we served 915 children breakfast and lunch during the second term.

On Sustainability, we have successfully done Phases 1 and 2 of our solar project, which is now complete and working. This will help us in a big way to cut down on our electricity costs, and the savings from this will help us feed the children and support other activities in the school and community. 

We have also been farming in the last few months to ensure that we are food secure. From April to July, we have tilled the land, pruned 1,500 coffee trees, planted maize, beans, and arrowroots. We are currently harvesting the maize from our farm. Our school vegetable garden has produced about 960 kilograms of produce for our school kitchen since our last update. We are hoping to have a good harvest this August.

Student Sponsorship is an integral part of how we fund our programs, as it goes a long way to ensure that our children have meals, space to play, a smooth transition, and access to technology and internet. We are encouraged by the many sponsors who support, subscribe, and renew their sponsorship every year, and we are always looking for sponsors to support our children. 

We appreciate everything you have all done to support us in the just-concluded second term of the year, and we will continue to update you all on our progress. The children are on a three-week holiday and will resume school from the 27th of August 2026 for the third and final term of this current school year.

Thank you and best regards,

St Martins School

Links:

• School Website