Education is a basic human right and fundamental to breaking the cycle of poverty and ensuring sustainable human development. By providing ALL children with quality primary education, governments will give individuals the opportunity and skills to lift themselves out of poverty.
Over 680 million children worldwide are enrolled in Primary Education - 6.5 million of them in Uganda alone. Whilst this has been a huge success story for the Ugandan Government's Universal Primary Education Programme, the quality of the schooling leaves a lot to be desired and many children do not complete Primary School. Over 77 million children worldwide receive no primary education at all.
In January 1997, the Ugandan Government took a very positive step forwards regarding education and introduced Universal Primary Education (UPE). This meant four children from every family including orphans and disabled children had the right to primary education free of charge. However, this led to a huge influx of new pupils which many of the primary schools were not prepared for. The result has been huge strains on teachers and resources which were already lacking before UPE.
Soft Power Education works with the Ministry of Education and local government to achieve the second of the UN Millennium Development Goals to achieve Universal Primary Education.
Since 2003 we have been working on a Government Primary School Renovation and Refurbishment Programme. This means bringing the schools up to Government standard. After an initial assessment of the school we work in three phases
- Refurbishment of existing classrooms which have not been condemned
- Demolition of any condemned classrooms and rebuild
- Building additional classrooms
Our volunteers both long and short term then paint the entire school and give it a new lease of life. Naturally all of this is highly dependent on funding and we don't complete all three phases at one school at the same time. We would rather refurbish the existing classrooms at 2 or 3 schools than do everything at one school. This also gives us time to fundraise for new buildings and also to ensure that the school maintains the newly refurbished buildings before we embark on a new build.
There are 96 Primary Schools in the Jinja District which is split into 7 sub counties.We have been working on schools in three of these sub counties. Click on each of the links below to see what we have achieved:
We have also recently worked at a two schools outside of these areas within the Wakisi sub county of Mukono District and Jinja town. We hope to work at further schools within these areas in the future.