Help bring Financial Stability to Uganda

Evans Ssenabulya and his wife, Roy, have three daughters under the age of eight. Like most parents, it was impossible for Evans to ignore the importance of investing in education as he watched his three beautiful girls grow up. He also noticed how many children in the community, mostly girls, were removed from school when their families became unable to cover expenses. In 2007, Evans decided to do something. He started a school of 100 students in a small wooden structure on a rented plot of land. Now, just six years later, he owns the land and has grown the Ridgeway School into a day and boarding program serving over 900 students. 

If you ask him, Evans will say that Opportunity International helped advance his dreams far beyond what he thought possible. Through three loans and a corresponding savings account, he was able to purchase land, construct buildings and open a retail store selling scholastic materials. Evans won’t stop there; he continues to dream about brighter futures for his students. He plans to refurbish and expand the existing facilities, increase enrollment to 5000, and introduce computer technology and life skills into the curriculum to better equip his students for the future. 

Opportunity believes that education should be a right, not a privilege and here’s what we are doing to help in Uganda.

Education Finance Products – 

With 99 active School Improvement loans and an outstanding portfolio valuing $1.5 million, Opportunity Uganda more than doubled the number of schools it added to its Banking on Education portfolio in the fourth quarter of 2012. Overall, Opportunity Uganda has transformed 122 schools since the program onset. Opportunity Uganda: 

• Distributed 10,714 School Fee loans cumulatively, mainly through the Trust Group model, making a substantial impact on the number of clients who can now send their children to school. 
• Provided 4,358 with School Fee loans this year helping families send their kids off to school. 
• Is poised to launch EduSave, an education insurance product tied to savings accounts, in 2013.  

Opportunity’s EduSave product, designed with MicroEnsure enables parents to earn an extra safety net for their children’s education. EduSave works when a parent saves enough money to qualify for free insurance. For example, when a parent saves $25 they qualify for $125 in school fees insurance – if they die or become permanently disabled, a trusted individual receives a payout of 5x the savings balance to keep the child in school. The product launched in Malawi with 170,000 parents qualified for coverage on the first day. Our average savings account holder has 3.8 children – therefore, on its first day, EduSave covered 646,000 Malawian children. The product also went live on a national scale in Ghana in early 2013.