Help Keep 15 Aspiring Ugandan Girls in School

Ritah is very excited that she finally has a sponsor!  For the past two years, we've been searching for a sponsor for her but potential sponsors kept choosing other children and not Ritah.

The good news is, Ritah is now about to finish eighth grade because of support from your donations through this project during the past two years. So rather than being forced to drop out of school after graduating from 6th grade where she had been a very responsible above average student, she was able to continue to secondary school.

Often after sixth grade, girls like Ritah who come from very poor families who cannot afford the higher school fees of secondary school have to drop out. Sadly, many of them become pregnant or are forced into early marriages or must farm and take care of younger siblings. Their hopes and dreams are dashed and forgotten.

We are glad that was not the case for Ritah because of this project! And now that she has a sponsor, your donations through this project can be directed to help other girls like Ritah who are taking their year-end exams for sixth grade next week.  We hope that many of these girls will be very successful and achieve high scores like Ritah and other girls have done these past few years. They too will be able to progress on to seventh grade in early 2024 even if we have not yet quickly found a sponsor for them.

Thank you from the bottom of our hearts for giving us peace of mind through your donations to this project. And especially thank you for giving girls like Ritah peace of mind knowing they can continue their schooling even though they don't yet have a sponsor!

Links:

• Learn more on our web site
• See our work through photos

This past February, we had to make some tough decisions on how many girls we could award scholarships to for 7th grade. The wonderful news that so many of our 6th grade students had done well on their year end exams in December was tempered by the stress of knowing that we did not currently have enough sponsors to support all students that had excelled on those exams.

Thanks to your donations through this GlobalGiving program, we boldly agreed to sponsor an additional eight girls to go to 7th grade even though we had no current sponsors for them.  We knew that if we did not offer them scholarships at this critical point in their schooling, they would most likely drop out of school forever. Sixth grade would have been the end point of their education. And considering how well many of them did on their exams, that would have been truly sad.

So we agreed to provide scholarships for these eight girls in hopes that we would be able to find sponsors for these children later this year.  So far, we have found sponsors for four of them and are continuing to urgently seek sponsors for the remaining four. We have included the photos of two of these girls, Esther and Lona, who very much appreciate that they are able to be in school at this very moment in spite of having no sponsor!

Your GlobalGiving donations are what is making this possible, to be able to pay their school fees until a more long-term sponsor can be found for them.

Thank you for your generosity in making sure these girls could continue their education and follow their dreams!

Links:

• See our work through photos
• Learn more on our web site