Dear friends of the MiekFoundation!
Early April we visited our projects in Uganda. Like the previous visits, this one was a hugely inspirational one! Apart from visiting the schools we work with in Buyege and the community of Bussi Island, we also visited several schools of higher education that a significant number of girls will go to in the coming years.
Buyege schools
We spent real quality time with the wonderful girls on our scholarship program at both the primary and the secondary school in Buyege. Overall, the girls are doing very well! First and foremost, all of them are in good health. It was wonderful to see how well they are developing, both in terms of their academic performance and as increasingly mature and independent human beings. All girls have passed their most recent tests and exams; and all of them are shaping their future dreams. To help them do the latter, our wonderful coach Emma Sempa is spending time with them to help them think about their aspirations for the future. Especially for the oldest girls in secondary school this is important.
Several girls that passed their exams for either S4 are S6 are preparing for university or vocational schools, i.e., bachelor’s degree, diploma or certificate. Betty Walakira (founder and Executive Director of our very important local partner, Health Child) is helping them write their applications. We are confident that this summer, several girls will embark on a very exciting next chapter!
We spent a wonderful evening with all girls on our scholarship program and the staff of the school where we had a joint dinner and enjoyed lots of local singing and dancing. The speeches the girls gave (including the youngest ones!) were really touching and impressive. Especially the stories about the ‘Giving Back’ activities they had organized for their community during their holidays were great to hear.
We also spent time with the teachers at the school, to understand how the girls are doing and to identify whether extra support our girls might need to make sure they are best positioned to get admitted to follow-up education.
Bussi Safe Center families and 100WEEKS groups
As always, our visit to the community of Bussi was wonderful. We visited our Safe Center that we doubled in capacity since we visited last time: we added a new building for the secondary school kids, as well as a new kitchen. The local community played an important role in realizing all this. It was heart-warming to see how the Safe Center has become a real successful and highly regarded institution at Bussi. Our partners from Health Child as well as from the local community (Mr. Segirinya and Mrs. Banji) as well as the wonderful teachers are critical to the success of the Safe Centers.
We also met a lot of parents and families either at the Safe Center or at their homes, which always is a very special experience. We were very grateful for the families opening their homes to us and sharing their stories of how proud they were of their daughters.
This was also the first time that we met the 100WEEKS groups at Bussi. These are the groups of women that we support in building businesses during a period of 100 weeks with the objective to improve their economic wellbeing. The groups are now 60 weeks into the journey and seem to be doing very well. Several women have either expanded existing small businesses or have developed new businesses. Also, the saving groups they have set-up are working well. We were impressed to see that both groups had set up a business together: the one group in food production, the other in event services. We are very confident that by the time we get to the end of the 100 weeks, most of the women will have come out of poverty and will be able to sustain their improved family income and can keep their families out of poverty. We are very grateful for the support the 100WEEKS team is giving us!
New schools for follow up education
We visited a series of schools for follow up education, both universities and vocational schools. These schools are in and around Kampala, as well as a little further away in cities like Wobulenzi and Jinja. The objective of these visits was to identify high quality and safe boarding schools for our girls to continue their education after S4 (Diploma or Certificate) or S6 (University). This year a few girls will graduate secondary school, during the next years a much larger number will do so – exciting times ahead.
Together with our partners from Health Child we will select a few schools that we will start working with in the coming years. We were impressed with the quality of the schools (both the curriculum, the teachers and the premises) that we visited, covering a variety of topics, from nursing to agriculture and finance.
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We all felt that our visit was a major success and a huge source of energy and inspiration. We were very happy and impressed to witness the progress and the impact to the community of the projects that the MiekFoundation is supporting. We are confident that with the support of our wonderful and very strong partners of both Health Child and the local communities we have established a strong foundation from which we will continue our work in the coming years!
We thank you, our committed supporters and donors, for your continued support to our Foundation. Without you, we would not have the impact that we are having today and will continue to have in the future, THANK YOU!
Warmest regards from all of us at the MiekFoundation and, much more important, from the wonderful girls of Bussi Island and their families!
