Help Children with Learning Difficulties in Uganda

Hello dear Backup family!

Since in Uganda we say happy new year to everyone that we have not yet seen since 2019 started: happy new year!! We hope 2019 has started well for you, and that it will be an amazing year for all of us. We sure have some dreams that we would like to see come true!

One of these dreams has been a big one since the day we started this organization. As you may remember, we started our work on the floor. Literally. In 2016, our co-founders Ronald and Annemaaike sat on the carpet of a living room and began. In 2018, we moved to a spare bedroom of the same house, where we finally had a separate office space to work from. But, we quietly hoped that it would become possible to move to a REAL office, outside of our team member’s home.

That is why we set up our #GivingTuesday and end of year fundraising campaign with only one goal: an office for Backup Uganda. We were hoping to raise a year’s worth of rent ($1,000), so that we could move to a humble space that could fit our growing team. Somewhere we could receive visitors without them having to take their shoes off and move through a living room first.

#GivingTuesday came, and boy, we were nervous on that 27th of November. We had no idea that within ONE day, we would just be a few dollars away from raising the full amount needed! And we definitely had no idea that on the last day of 2018, we would have received almost twice the amount we set as our goal: $1,601.

It is hard to find the words to thank everyone who has made this happen (you know who you are). It may seem like something simple, a room with a table, chairs and a couple shelves. To us, it opens doors to incredible opportunities to grow what we set out to do: developing support for children with learning difficulties. We plan to add people to our team this year, and now they will have a comfortable space to help us become a bigger, more effective Backup Uganda.

So how did our new year start?! With moving day! Plot 6, Jivan Abji Road is our new address in Gulu. We are very grateful to Antioch Church for being willing to share a space with us and for being fun neighbours. Check out the photos to see the first, real Backup Uganda office! Please know that it is filled with all the love you have showed us since day one, and that you are always welcome to come visit us.

With love,

The Backup Uganda Team

Hello dear friends (or should we say family by now?)!

Time is flying faster than a Uganda crane bird! As we speak, we have entered the final month of teaching and learning for the 2018 school year. In other words: we wish we could clone ourselves to be able to finish everything we want to accomplish before 2019 begins… But, we are doing our very best, and we are excited to let you read & see what we have been up to since you last heard from us!

First of all, the cloning? We could say it happened in a certain way! From September to December, our team is including two interns from Windesheim University in Zwolle, the Netherlands. Marieke and Manouk are completing their minor within the course Social Work with us. Their main task: further develop and improve the guidelines that we use to train the school teams in setting up individual support plans for learners who experience difficulties. Complicated sentence? Yes! And that’s pretty much how complicated this task is as well. It involves lots of conversations with teachers, the schools’ management, parents, and learners; countless changes and additions to the guidelines; testing all improved version of these guidelines; and all this in a repeated cycle! We are impressed by their excitement and determination to do their work as well as possible, so that their internship has a true impact on the quality of education for children who experience learning difficulties. Keep checking our social media to stay updated on their progress!

The work our interns are doing genuinely takes our school-based program to a higher level. Thanks to our workshops that we have been doing with the teachers this year, the identification of possible learning difficulties among their pupils has improved quite a bit. Then: what’s next, when your first interventions are not immediately doing the trick? As Manouk and Marieke are finetuning this process, we are hosting the final few workshops for this school year. For example, behavioural difficulties and autism spectrum disorders have been our main focus recently - with the teachers, and with the parents as well. This meant looking at recognizing children with similar challenges at school AND at home. It meant cracking our brains together with both teachers and parents about strategies to help these children learn better, in the classroom and in the home environment. At the moment, we only have two more parents workshops to go this year, plus a good number of lesson observations to help the teachers implement their new knowledge and skills. We can’t wait to hear from all of them during our end-of-year evaluation!

September in particular has been an exciting month for us. If you are familiar with the Ugandan school year, you may wonder: why, isn’t September a holiday month? Correct! We may not have been at our partner schools in September, but we were invited by two amazing education-based organizations to train their teams on learning difficulties: Geneva Global and Teach for Uganda. We are very much aware of the fact that we are not able to reach every school in Uganda by ourselves. However, there are wonderful nonprofits active in Uganda that we can partner with to spread our message as widely as possible. What did this look like? A total of almost 400 education professionals, trained by our team within no more than 6 days. By now, they are all ready to use what they have learned in their daily work!

Pssst, can you keep a little secret? Did you know we are working on something INCREDIBLY EXCITING? The process is in its earliest stages, but the adrenaline is making it hard to keep quiet about it: together with the education departments of the local government in Gulu and a few other development organizations, we are looking into the possibility of opening an assessment center for children with all kinds of special needs. Right now, it is quite hard for parents in Gulu to access the needed professionals for proper diagnosis of their children’s difficulties. Most times, it requires making the long journey to Uganda's capital city Kampala to speak with expensive professionals. Our intention is to bring these services to Gulu instead. We are dreaming BIG and working hard to achieve this.

That’s all for now! Please keep an eye on our social media pages for regular updates and fun announcements. #GivingTuesday is coming up on 27 November, and we just so happen to know that GlobalGiving is planning an awesome matching opportunity to make your contributions have even more impact than they already do on any other day of the year. We will keep you posted!!

As always, apwoyo matek!