Building Hope for Children in Uganda

In September 2023 I received a phone call from a man, Mr Hagaba Moses, I had met in Uganda earlier in the year. This was his request;

“I have 50 orphans in a refugee camp. They get one (poor quality) meal each day and they cannot go to school. They have no hope and I go to bed crying every night over these children. Please teach me how to give these children hope.”

It would have been easy to simply say that I didn’t know, end the conversation and I probably would not have heard from Moses again. I could have continued to live my comfortable life, with three good meals each day, a warm home and cosy bed. Instead, I found my head buzzing with questions such as;

                  ‘Who are these children?

                  ‘Where do they come from?’

                  ‘Why can’t they go to school?’

                  ‘Who is responsible for these children?’

I began researching the problem and found that there is no such thing as free education in Uganda, (despite the Governments claims). Even in the ‘free’ schools, parents have to pay for paper, pencils, exercise books, even toilet paper, etc. Many schools, private and ‘free’, are boarding schools because the children lucky enough to attend them, live so far away that travelling (and the cost of travel) on a daily basis is impossible and unsafe. If a child needs to board, this obviously incurs a much greater fee. As it is, you can see children walking several miles to school each day. There aren’t many ‘free’ schools, especially in rural areas. A teacher in one of these schools might only have as little as 40% chance of being paid, so understandably, teachers will leave at the first opportunity of a more secure, regular income. This can leave classes with no qualified teacher, resulting in a very poor standard of education. Consequently, many parents do not see paying any money at all for education as good value for money and would rather send even very young children out to work to earn their food.

The photograph above shows a class with 150 children being taught by a single teacher. Notice that many of the children do not have chairs. It is just one of the schools we are trying to support.

The photo was taken from a YouTube video which shows the problems in greater detail. It can be found via this link:

https://youtu.be/OCOUV6-h3Rw?si=UOJOkPplwjGN6u7f

Images like this made me determined to do something, anything I could to help Moses. Between the two of us, we began building BUPECHIU.

I produced a training program and began delivering it through Zoom workshops.