Improve Learning Outcomes for Ugandan Children

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

• Snap shot of our most recent activity (PDF)