20,000 Books for Children in Rural Uganda

In my village, a typical boy – call him Sam will drop out of school in grade 4 or 5 partly because he cannot read and comprehend and has failed to pass his end of year exams to go to the next class. After repeating this class once or twice he losses interest in coming to school, where he gets called names. Sam is one of the 70% of children in primary schools in Uganda who can not read and comprehend and so end up dropping out before they complete primary school.

When he drops out he will end up in the Sugar cane plantation cutting sugar cane to earn an income. Two years later, he is an active teenager with an income. As emotions rage on in his developing body, he makes a school girl almost his age pregnant. Their poor parents force them to get married because they can’t handle the burden of taking care of baby. Sam is allocated a small piece of land in his father’s compound where he builds his small hut and starts a family. By the time he is 25, he has 6 kids and is tired of his wife. He makes another school girl pregnant and makes her his second wife. By age 30, Sam is having multiple children, and several wives and concubines. He is no longer as energetic as he was before and several jobs pass him at the sugar cane plantation. His family demands have quadrupled and out of frustration he resorts to alcohol. Sam will most likely be dead before his 45^thbirthday and his children, having no role model, will repeat the same cycle. 

It is this cycle that we are working to break. Our focus is on making learning fun, and enabling children to LEARN to READ so they can READ to LEARN. Through this campaign to take 10 million books to 10 million kids across the country, we believe we can make a difference. 

Many Children like Sam do not have access to books that they can relate to, and in many ways for them reading = exams which is not fun. This campaign is geared towards providing beautifully illustrated and locally relevant children’s books. 

Since the inception of this campaign, with your help we have gotten over 40,000 books into the hands of children, thanks to you and we hope we shall be able to continue this trend and get several children reading. We are still a long way to getting books into the hands of children. Please consider telling your friends and family about our project - share the link on your blogs or social networks, use the tell-a-friend feature on the project page to email your network, or just bring us up in conversation. You know your friends and family best, so use your own words - tell them why you chose our project and what it means to you.

Links:

• http://www.spellingbee.ug/campaigns