Education Uganda Project #26970

Improve Learning Outcomes for Ugandan Children

by enjuba Spelling Bee

Improve Learning Outcomes for Ugandan Children

Project Report | Sep 28, 2017
You are making a difference...

By Aaron Kirunda | Chief Executive

A blind boy participates in the Spelling Bee

Thank you for your continued support, you are making a real difference, not only in the lives of children and their teachers but entire households. Thank you again for making our work possible.

We are on the road again, conducting Regional Spelling Competitions across the country, from North to South, East, West and Central Uganda. We shall be interfacing directly with over 3,000 children and over 1,000 teachers. The 3,000 children are those that emerged as champions in their school Spelling Bees and will be representing their schools at regional competitions. In total, we are conducting 14 events across the country and we have so far finished 4. On Monday we were in Arua, West Nile 480km out of Kampala and we are currently in Gulu, where we just finished a competition and shall be headed to Lira tomorrow.

In the competition today, the Municipal Inspector of Schools came to the event in the morning to give an opening address with intentions of leaving thereafter. However, due to the captivating nature of the competition, she confessed that she failed to leave and stayed on until 5pm in the evening when the event ended, a big testament to how far we have come, thanks to your support.

These spelling competitions shine a light on the state of our education system, and in just two days we have seen a stark difference between supported teachers and schools and unsupported ones. We did not conduct a teacher training for teachers in West Nile region, and as a result the teachers looked disinterested and many of the kids finished the competition without spelling a single word correct. On the contrary in Acholi region, where we conducted our teacher training program, the teachers were very excited and supportive of the learners, the competition was stiff, as all children were able to spell most words correctly. Our teacher trainings focus on emotional intelligence, positive psychology, teacher effectiveness and changing the mindsets of teachers, so they can look at their role as teachers more positively.

Based on testimonies from past years, we know that our Spelling Competitions never leave the kids the same. Many of them gain so much confidence to face anything in life and several others go on to pick a serious interest in reading, which helps them to stay in school longer and puts them in a position where they never fail the same words again. We are excited to continue building on this success to reach and impact even more children.

Talking about reading, this October, we are officially launching a campaign to get one million books to one million kids. This ambitious campaign is intended to get children across the country to fall in love with books, so they can learn to read, this is especially because only 3 of every 10 kids in grade 3-7 are able to read and comprehend and English story. You can participate in this by buying a child a book or supporting an entire school with Books for their School library. Your contribution will directly go towards publishing and distributing locally relevant and relatable books to children. Go here to participate in this.

Join us on the road and follow all the activities and the fun we are having through our social media channels on twitter and facebook

Thank you

Child Spelling

Children reading their newly received book prizes

6 year old Henrica won the local language bee

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Jun 30, 2017
Hope is in the air

By Aaron Kirunda | Chief Executive

Training in Lira

We spent the past month travelling about 5,000 kilometers around the country, engaging with over 1,500 teachers of lower primary, upper primary and in most cases head teachers, thanks to your financial support. We covered topics ranging from personal awareness, life skills and life purpose. We also engaged on what makes a great teacher great before diving deep into our programs, that have expanded to include a writing competition.

At the end of each training – which took about 4-5 hours in district halls or classrooms, offered to us free by the community as part of their contribution, teachers were so happy they came. They said things like, “this was very beneficial to me as a person, thank you for sharing with us;” “I feel inspired and empowered to live a better life and help learners stay in school and achieve their dreams,” and made commitments such as “I will get more engaged in supporting pupils and creating a conducive environment for them to learn better.”

At all the trainings, there was an overwhelming enthusiasm from all teachers who with a lot of energy, loudly shouted that they were the most powerful people in the world. And yes, in some of the trainings the beginning was a bit hard, as teachers wondered why we were focusing on them instead of talking about the Spelling Bee, which was why they came. But at the end, everyone felt that they had a role to play and were ready to play that role back in their schools, to become change agents.

Midway these trainings, we realized we had embarked on creating a movement of positive change that will sweep across Uganda and the World, and now we believe more than ever that we are on track to achieving our vision of having Responsible Citizens, Authentic Leaders and Credible Change Agents at the end of the day.

In these trainings, we also distributed books – training manuals and readers, that were also made possible because of your financial support. The readers are fully illustrated and beautiful, some with children written stories. The stories are relatable and attractive, making children fall in love with books. We are confident that when this happens, children will LEARN to READ and then they will READ to LEARN.

We are now preparing for the District, Regional and National Spelling Bee Competitions that are coming up in September and October. In the meantime, we are working on getting a million books to a million children in Uganda, because we believe that the change we need starts with Reading. Here is a link: https://goo.gl/iXvDHh

Join in, and buy a book (reader) for a child in Uganda at only $2. You can also share this with your network through your social media channels, and on July 12, every recurring donation will be matched 100%, so you can double your impact.

Tweet: Change starts with reading. I have joined the #1millionBooksto1millionKids campaign to get books to Ugandan children. https://goo.gl/iXvDHh

Moses demonstrating a Spelling Bee to teachers

Teachers discussing with each other

Aaron conducting a training

Links:

1 million books to 1 million kids campaign

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Apr 3, 2017
Thank you

By Aaron Kirunda | Chief Executive

Hello family (now you are part of our family),

Thank you so much for your financial and moral support in enabling us meet our target on this platform. With your help, you got us in first place of this just concluded March Accelerator, and that has won us a bonus of $3,000. These funds are going to go a long way in enabling us implement our programs this year. We shall keep you posted every step of the way.

I would like to take this opportunity to share with you an exciting milestone we reached this March. A few years ago, we started working together with the US Peace Corps and Ministry of Education to promote reading through an initiative called DEAR Day (Drop Everything And Read), and we have been growing it at a relatively small level in parallel with the Spelling Bee.

This year, we thought we needed to do something different, and go beyond just schools and involve everyone to read. So we started a campaign to highlight the importance of reading, and it went viral. Many organizations and media houses picked it up and did their own activities in celebration of the same on March 15th, and the Education Ministry moved to make it permanent and designated every third Wednesday of March a National DEAR Day, moving forward. Here attached is a clipping from New Vision, Uganda's leading newspaper, that speaks about the event plus some Twitter screen shots - in case you have not seen them already.

As you all know, reading is such an important and necessary part of our world today. We need to read to survive, yet many times it has been said that if you want to hide something from a Ugandan, just place it in a book (You don’t even have to write it, just place it in there and it will be hidden). Our reading initiatives are geared towards changing this narrative, and of course reading is the basis for our Spelling Bee program.

Thank you again for your support. Now our work starts!

Links:

http://www.enjuba.com

Attachments:

Snap shot of our most recent activity (PDF)

1 Attachment

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