Yiya empowers poor, at-risk high school students living in post-conflict Northern Uganda to view themselves as engineers who have the knowledge and skills to design and build technologies that solve real problems faced by their communities! We use engineering challenges to make their education more engaging, hands-on, and relevant to life outside the classroom! The engineering units are closely aligned to math and science learning standards from the Ugandan national high school syllabus.
Young people in post-conflict Northern Uganda live in extreme poverty. They lack access to quality education, receive little support for development of life skills, and have high unemployment rates (currently at 83%). These factors often drive them to income generation with negative impacts on their communities, such as prostitution, theft, or home-brewed alcohol. Yiya uses engineering to empower youth to create positive change by applying school knowledge to solve urgent community problems.
Yiya makes high school education in these rural communities more engaging, hands-on, and relevant to real life! We train and support teachers to run engineering challenges where their students learn to apply math and science skills to solve urgent community challenges. Our program exposes students to engineering careers, while also showing them the real-world value of technical subjects, such as math and science, especially their importance to everyday life and the wellbeing of their communities
In 2018, Yiya will train 30 teachers and 240 students in 6 high schools. The engineering units will include [1] gravity lights (mechanical engineering) and [2] composting latrine toilets (agricultural engineering). Afterwards, students and teachers will share their technologies with the wider community in an Engineering Showcase. After participating in our program, Yiya students have demonstrated higher achievement in math & science, and are more engaged both in school and their communities.
This project has provided additional documentation in a PDF file (projdoc.pdf).
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