Educate 300 Refugee Children in Uganda

End of Year Report on the Refugee Child Education and Care Programme

Background

As many people, institutions and organizations were stack and did not know what they should to address the problem of refugee children to access education and put in place adequate measures for their protection, PPDR came with an idea of setting a class for refugee children where the initial focus was a transitional progress to enable refugee children from countries where English is not spoken to integrate the Education system in Uganda.

This transition was intended to teach refugee children English for six months and then let them go to formal education. Later we realized that there are children who cannot access the already existing education system in Uganda as they are too poor to access both the Government Universal Primary Education and the private
schools and actually these are the majority of the refugee children in Kampala.

And this explained why we started the idea of Primary School for refugee children in Kampala which is being run by PPDR Uganda and where more than 300 children have access education this year 2013.

Activities

At PPDR Uganda offices, we managed to put in place four classes which are from Primary One up to Primary. The school starts from 8:00 am and ends at 1:00pmwith a break time at 10:30 am to 11am. All the four teachers are refugees who have been given the task to play their part of responsibility to work for the better of refugee communities in Uganda.

We also realized that Kampala alone has thousands of refugee children and all of them may not come to PPDR and PPDR may not accommodate them, this explained our move to advocate for the education of the less privileged children in Kampala and eventually in Uganda. Our team joined then the United nations High Commissioner for Refugee which requested the Forum for Education NGOs in Uganda to address the question of education to refugee children under the Education in emergency.

Through this forum, we managed to present the real problem affecting refugees and the correct information on what is on ground as we believed that the access to this information will help to make right decisions towards the wellbeing of refugee children.

This year we managed to give the necessary information to both the UNHCR and the Uganda government and our position about the education of refugee children in Uganda. Many among the urgent things we proposed are to be implemented by both the UNHCR and the Uganda Government such as the overcharging refugees like migrants in schools, the translation of refugee school papers, the equation of refugee papers, the accurate statistics of refugee children in schools and the coordination of the Education in Emergency which should ensure that each refugee child is in school.

Achievements

At the beginning of this year we had the following objectives:

To
speak on behalf of refugee children in Uganda to both UNHCR and the Uganda Government,

To set up a model of a primary school which other organization can learn from,

To protect 300 refugee children in school and to draw a line of simulation between refugee children and other vulnerable children in the communities,

We are glad to see that all these were achieved apart from the last which we only managed to offer education to 90 children at ago in our four classes yet the intention was to have a primary school of seven classes offering education to 300 children at ago.

The money raised

So far from May 2013 up to now we have managed to raise a total amount 85$ USA from three donors. We greatly thank them for this wonderful support and we hope to use for the rent of the space we are using as we have a long outstanding unpaid rent arrears of four (4) months and each month we pay 500$ USA.
 

Challenges

This year despite the fact that we have struggling to do our best, we faced number of challenges all are connected to funds such as:

Paying for rent for the school and the offices,

Allowances to the teachers and their trainings to make them professionals, up to now our teachers are not paid and this has affected greatly the programme,

Limited books and scholastic materials both for the teachers and the children,

Lack of benches and durable black boards and classes being small comparing to the number of children,

The failure to offer education to grown up children especially those who are between 12 – 16 years and who have never been in school or who are in lower classes,

The failure to add other classes like primary five, six and seven to provide education to teenagers,

Opportunities

For the first time in three years this project managed to earn a permanent post on GlobalGiving which gives us a chance to raise money through the year from different people,

We have a nice office space with a possibility to expand in case the money is available,

We have the opportunity to run Income Generating Activities at the office such as Canteen, Computer Training, Public Secretarial Service, …for self-financial sustainability but we have so far failed to raise the capital,

Threats

This project is facing two major threats and which need an urgent solution

Paying for the office rent and class rent in time,

Providing the allowances for the teachers in time,

Links:

• Some activities at PPDR Uganda this year 2013