Improve literacy for Ugandan rural children

"My child is now reading everything he finds after participating in the Spelling Bee!" exclaimed Barkia, Jordan's mother. Jordan is one of the 700,000 pupils who directly participated in our spelling bee program this year. The Spelling Bee is an annual Spelling competition for primary school children with the aim of improving literacy, unlocking our children's imagination and helping them develop key life skills such as confidence, teamwork, critical thinking and presentation skills. 

We have been receiving a lot of feedback from parents and teachers all year round about the impact that our program is making in the lives of children. There is a 20-30% improvement among children participating in our programs in their test scores. Many of these children are confidently interacting well with their peers and teachers. They are able to ask questions, and to seek out reading materials. They are also creating friendships that will last a life time, and they are 90% less likely to drop out of school.

Through this year, children like Jordan got a chance to dive deep into learning new words - positive words that change the world, their meanings and how to use those words in sentences. Teachers are critical to this process as they spend most of the time with children. So we invested heavily in teacher trainings, travelling all over the country and conducting trainings in child centered teaching techniques, phonetics and leadership. We believe that teachers are very powerful, and empowering them with the right skills and tools can go a long way in revolutionalizing our education system. We trained over 2,000 in-service and pre-service teachers. Through these interactions we got to understand the deep underlying challenges in our education system. We found out that many of the teachers have difficulty reading and understanding texts, they are less confident and have a low self esteem, and when a government report came out indicating that 80% of primary school teachers can not read, it just confirmed what we had seen and learnt.

enjuba has reached over 2,000,000 children in the last 4 years through Spelling Bees and reading initiatives like Drop Everything And Read (DEAR). In these four years, our work has just started, and what we experienced over this year was evidence. We witnessed students from one of the schools in Northern Uganda, where we had gone for the first time, fail to Spell a single word correctly in an entire competition. We also witnessed considerable improvement and a stiff spelling competition in regions we have been for 2-3 years. This attested to the impact that our work is creating and a gap that we need to fill.

This year, we also expanded and launched the first ever African Spelling Bee, with counterparts in 9 other African countries. We had the first championship in July in Johannesburg, South Africa. 3 pupils from Uganda went to represent. They were the first in their families to get on a plane, they got a chance to meet and make friends with children from other countries. It was an experience of a lifetime. Through the African Spelling Bee, we are able to unlock our children's imagination, and get them to see other countries, meet other people and see the world beyond their small village. We are now planning for the 2017 African Spelling Bee to take place in Mombasa, Kenya.

Our commitment to empower children like Jordan, and help them fall in love with words, develop key life skills and see the world differently is only possible because of the support of special individuals like you and foundations who provide the funds needed to scale this program countrywide, and to provide the necessary training and tools for teachers and the materials for children to learn from. Teachers need refresher courses and children reading materials and games to make learning fun. It will cost $150 to provide the necessary training and materials in every school for the 2017 programme. 

In the coming year, our plan is to deepen our engagement with teachers and schools, so that we can deepen our impact. We plan to set up reading clubs in all schools and work with publishing companies and newspapers to provide them books and weekly newspaper pullouts.

Links:

• http://www.spellingbee.ug