Opportunities for
future generations

Like in previous years, we expanded the group of girls we support in the boarding school program. Our partners of Health Child focused on admitting new girls at Secondary school level. We learned that girls that completed Primary school and who we got to know at Safe Center are best positioned to join our program successfully. Initial school results of the newly admitted girls look very promising.
All girls have great hopes and dreams for their future! To help them shape their future, we scaled our coaching/mentoring program. Throughout 2024 our very experienced coach facilitated sessions that helped the girls shape their future dreams and plans.
Early 2024, the first girl graduated from Secondary school and moved to technical school, a major milestone! She is doing very well and is starting her first internship in Kampala! We expect another 3-5 girls to move to higher education early 2025, hopefully including at least 2 who will move to university to study medicine and accountancy. We will do whatever we can ‘to make their dreams come true’.

Our Safe Center keeps developing very well. We built a second building so we can host larger groups of children. The construction has now finished, allowing us to support groups of over 100 girls and boys during weekends and school breaks.
We are still facing challenges getting qualified teachers to the island at reasonable costs. The launch of a new ferry connection to the mainland has made that a little easier as the travel time to the island has come down considerably. Most recently our partners of Health Child have also included parents in parts of the educational and coaching programs.

The Safe Center is run with a lot of support from parents and other community members. Some support by delivering parts of the courses, others by providing building materials or firewood, others do the cleaning and the cooking. Also, the older girls from our School Program make wonderful contributions during their school breaks by supporting the younger children at the Safe center with their homework and other tasks.

In spring, we launched the first two groups of 25 women that we support in building businesses, to get them out of poverty. This program is run by our partners of 100WEEKS, with support from the local contacts of the MiekFoundation. Each group gets a coach from the local community who is trained and supported by 100WEEKS. The program is composed of three important components:
(1) weekly non-conditional cash transfers: each women gets EU 8 per person per week via her mobile and can freely spend, save or invest (!) that money
(2) weekly half-day trainings, facilitated by the coaches, across a range of topics like finance, business building, family planning and health
(3) saving groups in which the women of the group save the money they don’t spend. Each women can borrow money from the savings group if she needs money for the new business and has a good investment plan. They group jointly decides in which initiatives they will invest and under which conditions. We have high hopes that we will see a wonderful series of entrepreneurial initiatives develop soon and that, like in other programs, most of the women and their families will find their way out of poverty! Over the past years, in other 100WEEKS programs, over 75% of the participating women successfully gets out of poverty within 100 weeks. And even more important, that percentage keeps going up after the formal closure of the 100WEEKS led program!