Help Children with Learning Difficulties in Uganda

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!