Education for Poor Children!

Greetings friends and donors,

Since our last update at Share Project and the Hammerslag School, much of our efforts have continued as usual. The majority of our focus over the past few months has been to ensure the children receive adequate food, shelter and care at the school, and that our teachers are paid a fair and consistent wage each month. This has been difficult with the lack of recurring donations, however we remain positive that we will secure more partnerships in the future.

For now, Good Neighbors, a humanitarian NGO, has been our most reliable partner by sponsoring our boarding children with food and clothing supplies. To date, they sponsor 46 students, and in addition to providing basic living supplies to our orphaned and most vulnerable children, they have promised to buy the school a water tank to trap rainwater to solve our issues with providing clean/filtered water at the school. They have also started a program to provide sanitary towels to our female students and teachers, and sports uniforms to all the children. They also plan to assist in building a seperate latrine for the girls (however, this will require more land and space that we hope to fundraise for in the coming months).

We are worked diligently to enlist other organizations to donate supplies, complete the schools construction and to support continued programming.  Some of the organizations we have been in active conversation with or have submitted applications to include: Home of Good Hope, Peace Corps, Edinburgh Global Partnerships, Room to Read and Dubai Cares. Partnerships like these, and support from donors like you will be pivotal to maintaining or mission.

As for other updates at the school -- the children have started using the new classroom partition, installed to separate the nursery and primary one students. Children, teachers and parents are very happy about this new development and as a result the students’ population in the entire school has doubled in the last year. In the nursery alone the total population is over 100 children!

Since the start of 2019, the school has also attracted 10 newly qualified teachers from Kampala's teacher training college. Because there are no rooms for rent in the village, the new teachers are living at the school compound in spaces we have converted for use as a dormitory. We were able to install another solar light in these areas so that they have adequate light to prepare their lessons at night. We also purchased firewood, food and living supplies for the boarding students and teachers.

Another exciting development in our organization’s progress is our official registration as an NGO in Uganda. GlobalGiving donations have helped Share to pay the legal fees necessary to register in Uganda, Previously, we were operating as a Community Based Organization (CBO), which meant each year we had to process a new certificate; a costly and time consuming procedure. Now that we have internationally recognized NGO status, many more funding opportunities are available to us.

Finally, we remain in constant communication with beneficiaries (students, parents and community members) to ensure we are achieving desired outcomes. Although there is much to improve on, we have received powerful feedback from affected individuals who confirm that our programs are working and that students love the opportunity to learn. They have also stressed the importance of the school’s success in this extremely poor and rural of areas.

With that, I leave you with our most urgent needs that we hope to fulfill with any leftover funds:

• School desk and chair construction: there is big shortage here, with some children seated on the desks and others on the floor. We need 100 desks and chairs, which will cost about 500 USD.
• Textbooks to prepare for Uganda's national examinations. Our upper primary students are about to sit for their Primary Leaving Examinations (PLE). 100 USD will purchase the necessary textbooks for them and future students to more adequately prepare.
• Although Good Neighbors has agreed to help construct an extra latrine, we need funds to purchase more land and supplies to create a safe and healthy facility.
• Money for flooring in the nursery and primary one classrooms. The floors are currently packed dirt and present health risks to the little ones.

We face many challenges, including limiting funding and external resources but we hope that our hard work and passionate efforts will contribute to long-term change in our community!