Edu-Boost Project

Quality Education is crucial and should aim at building capacity and knowledge in the rural populace so as to improve their ability to understand policies, procedures, rights, duties, government schemes, legislation, and available benefits, all crucial to making informed decisions.

Despite the benefits education brings to these fishing communities, Education often takes a back seat whenever there are competing needs such as Labour demand for fishing, loading and offloading fish, cleaning, sorting, and smoking/drying fish. Parents turn to Child Labour. The same is witnessed in the agricultural section.

The study calendar is heavily interrupted and disrupted with many failing to consistently appear in school. Most teenage girls have been forced to completely drop out of school due to lax mindsets parents have on education which has contributed to early child marriages.

This is a setback to education in these communities besides the fact that their disparities in resource allocations by the government for educational services in remote areas of Lake Kyoga compared to urban and peri-urban centers across the country.

The Edu-boost project was launched to shore morale, and transform parents’ and guardians’ mindsets to increase the educational attainment of children in these communities by supporting Foundation to; –

  • Increase the number of children completing primary school and transitioning into secondary school.
  • Reduce the number of school dropouts as a result of splitting time between work and school
  • work with teachers, head teachers, and parents to improve the results of students, especially at the end of year school and national examinations.
  • Reduce early marriages and teenage pregnancies.

Through the EDU-Boost Project, The Foundation, in the last 3 years, has worked with line key stakeholders to build capacity and knowledge, besides mobilizing Resources to address existing gaps. The most notable interventions include; –

  1. Annual Purchase & Distribution of Pre-Primary Leaving Exams set by recognized Assessment entities, to at least 21 primary schools in Serere. This is supplemented by Mathematical sets. It’s evident one of the most effective ways to prepare for exams is to practice taking past versions. This introduces pupils to the format of questions, polishing understanding of examinable topics, and time allotment to each question when attempting it in the final exams.

Performance is steadily improving based on results released by Uganda National Examination Board in the past two years.  Professional examiners are also facilitated to travel to these remote schools to orient pupils and teachers to be at par with their urban counterparts in the distillation of the education syllabus.

  1. Purchase of land for the Establishment of a community-supported Primary School in Agonyo II, under Kidetok town council.
  2. Distribution of sports assortments to schools for extra-curricular activities. It’s ironic that St. Elizabeth Girls School Kidetok has gone on to win all sports medals at district and regional level competitions despite not having a paved sports Field in school premises for practice as is the case with all the 3 secondary schools in Pingire.

There are plans to expand the initiative to benefit lower secondary students and eventually those in high school. We look forward to partnering with program well-wishers to realize this. 

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