Restore Lives of 100 Children with Disabilities.

Chess helps children with special needs improve their memory and also do better in school. Despite that, Godfrey Nanyenya, a disability activist at Joy For Children Uganda and a chess coach says parents are not quick to embrace the sport.

“Teaching children with disabilities is quite challenging,” he reveals, “it is not only a skill they need, but they also lack basic needs.”

Nanyenya says when he goes into the community to train the children, he finds that they are lacking necessities in life such as food, which hinders them from properly concentrating on the game.

Besides that, some parents do not take the game of playing chess seriously.  “They think you are wasting their children's time,” he says.

To get the parents to agree to it, Nanyenya says he has to go an extra mile of enlightening them about what chess is and showing them videos of how children who have participated benefitted from it.

“The community sees children with special needs as incapable of doing anything in life but when you show them series of how other children have been transformed in life and how they have made it, the parents change their attitude,” he says.

Nanyanye reveals that when he introduced children with low brain development to chess, they started improving in their education especially in science subjects.

Starting to play chess in Primary Six at Bat Valley Primary school, Nanyenya says he voluntarily trains the special needs children to challenge the negative mindset in the community.

He advises parents who have such children to expose them to a variety of things. “Most of these children are very talented but they are not exposed,” he says. “You should not just lock your children in the house but rather unlock their potential.”