#GivingTuesday - Health and Education in Uganda

What a year it's been! Despite the challenges we've faced as a collective community, we have so much to be grateful for this year. When COVID-19 began to spread across the globe so many months ago, we knew that we would be stretched in ways we hadn't imagined. Whether making sure our community families had access to food and sanitization material, ensuring children continued to learn even while they were away from the classroom and had no computer or internet access, or providing our staff with financial security while ensuring their continued safety, continuing operations in 2020 was no easy feat. However, our team and our supporters went above and beyond month after month to provide our community with the lifesaving resources they needed while demonstrated positivity and optimism. 

In 2020, we shifted students learning from the classroom to safe, socially distant locations spread around the community. We provided approximately 92,000 meals, 300 mosquito nets, and hundreds of bars of soap. We also continued to engage with our teachers in training remotely, sharing learning over text message and meeting in person in small, safe groups. Our work has never stopped, and the imapct of this continuity of serivces on our families has been tremendous. Thank you for your support, now more than ever. 

In an effort to mitigate the impact of COVID-19 on our community, we have distributed food to our students’ households in surrounding villages at least once per month since March, reaching 408 families with these distributions. During these initial distributions, we also carried out a COVID-19 education session with our families, discussinghow COVID-19 spreads and how to best prevent transmission. 

This summer, we provided academic support to 320 primary seven children from 10 schools in our sub-county through the production and distribution of academic enrichment materials two times per month.

Since June, 15 SOUP teachers have been carrying out daily home school lessons for small groups of children in the community, reaching 389 students each week in a safe, socially distant environment and holding classes outside when possible.

Over the past few months, our team has created an ALP handbook with input and guidance from educational experts across Uganda and the United States. This handbook will be a useful reference guide for teachers of all levels to implement active learning in their classrooms after they have completed training with our ALP team.

This month, our team hosted a dialogue session at a local teacher training college were the ALP is implemented. We discussed the impact of COVID-19 on education and teacher training, and discussed how active learning can be applied successfully in this new learning environment.