eric’s post #3

We just returned from a great trip to Kyangwali Refugee Settlement with Beth and Aimee Heckel, two of Educate!’s strongest supporters.  Aside from Boris having to cram in the back of a truck with two sacks of charcoal and all our bags in the rain on the way home, the trip was very successful.  We held a two day conference with the Educate! students in a classroom of Kinyekitaka Primary School, where the COBURWAS Educate! club holds its meetings.  Almost all of our students, except the two in Rwanda and one who attends nursing school in the north, were able to attend.  We held conversations about everything from email writing (led by Boris) to leadership, which was the main theme of the conference.  It was our goal to encourage our students to take on leadership roles in their school, develop independence from Educate! by raising money to supplement our sponsorship, and build social entrepreneurship skills that will help them become successful upon graduation while giving back to their communities or homelands.  We asked three of our students who have already taken on leadership roles to speak about their experiences.  Marcel Bahati talked about becoming head boy of Sir Tito Winyi Secondary School and the challenges he faced as the school’s first non-Ugandan head boy. Daniel Muhwezi talked about becoming the computer lab prefect of Sir Tito.  Wereje Benson spoke about his experience starting COBURWAS, the numerous obstacles he faced, and how he was able to overcome them.  Marcel Bahati also spoke about choosing a career path and Wereje Benson spoke about personal finance and managing money.  I think the students took the speeches and discussions to heart, especially those by their peers.  Overall the conference was successful and several students came up to us with ideas they had about social entrepreneurship or becoming more involved in their communities after the conference.

Things have truly started to come together at the end of our trip.  Yesterday morning we returned to Windle Trust, an organization that has been sponsoring refugees for thirty years in several African countries and has been operating in Uganda since 1996.  Their mission is similar to ours: provide refugees with an education and the skills they need to become leaders in solving the problems that face Uganda as well as their homelands.  Windle has offered to administer the financial aspect of our sponsorships: transferring money for our students’ tuition fees to the schools directly and delivering additional funds for supplies, healthcare, and transportation to the students directly.  This will avoid the difficulties we have faced trying to transfer our students funds via Western Union or directly to their bank accounts.  What is more, the administration fee Windle charges is less than the transfer costs we are currently paying through Western Union.  Windle also has developed sound accountability methods so we can be sure our students will be receiving the appropriate amount of money in a timely manner.  Windle has field officers who visit each student at least once per month and the organization has relations with the schools our students attend.  Windle will also help with the non-financial support, such as advice and friendship, our students currently receive from members of Educate! student clubs as well as Boris and me.  Our students can reach the Windle field officer at any time, as well as the directors of the organization, who have an open door policy.  In many cases, we wish we could see our students personally about issues they are dealing with rather than communicating through email.  Now, if they would like, our students will be able to speak with someone from Windle personally, at any time, who has experience mentoring students.  And we will still be there to provide support, friendship, and advice to our students where we can.  

We introduced the idea of partnering with Windle to the Educate! students at the conference in Kyangwali.  After much heated debate about the exact terms of the contract, our students agreed to the partnership.  Yet, if for some reason our students are not satisfied with Windle then we reserved the complete right to end the partnership and we can return to running our sponsorships under our current system.  Our students will be in constant communication with us during the beginning phases of the partnership to make sure that everything is going as planned with Windle.  In the long run, we believe the partnership will provide more support and opportunities to our students and allow Educate! to greatly expand our sponsorships as the primary limitation will now be money, not time.

We are scheduled to leave Uganda tomorrow and I think Boris, Stacey, and I all feel very good about the trip.  I can easily say this has been the most productive trip I have had to Uganda, largely thanks to all the contacts and networking Boris did here Kampala.  His work led to our partnership with Windle as well as the ideas we have for new programs focused on leadership, which he outlines in his blog.  I am looking forward to planning in more detail the implementation of our new programs and getting feedback from our supporters about the direction Educate! is looking to take in the future.   

eric post #2

The majority of our time here has been filled, literally all day and most of the night, with meetings Boris has done an incredible job of organizing.  Among others we have met with some of the best schools in the country, many NGO’s with whom we are exchanging ideas, including Afroeducare (www.StudyinUganda.com), and we just came from a Rotary Club meeting here in Kampala where we set up a meeting with the head of Rotary in East Africa.

From these meetings we are looking to develop a clear and feasible direction to take the organization in the future to best accomplish the mission: empowering and developing the future leaders of Africa.  This has been our goal in sponsoring students.  However, in addition to sponsorship, we think there are many ways we can do a better job of encouraging leadership.  In doing so, we hope to give talented young people here the skills and confidence they need to grow up and work to solve the larger problems that Africa is facing.

Boris explains two of the ideas in his recent blog.  Here I will elaborate on the third.  We are looking to add to the curriculum of schools we are developing partnerships with.  Currently the Ugandan education system is strictly test based, such that the students are encouraged to only memorize the information that will be asked on the Ugandan National Education Board (UNEB) exams, without thinking independently or becoming involved in extracurricular activities.  We hope to incorporate into the curriculum social entrepreneurship and in doing so accomplish two goals.  First, help students to think independently by designing projects of their own, give students confidence from implementing those projects, and give them skills and ideas to continue to have a positive contribution to society as they pursue their goals and hopefully become leaders in the future.  Second, the projects the students come up with as a part of their education will have a positive influence on the communities from which they come and help Uganda as a whole to develop.

We have been going over the ideas with everyone we meet, many people who have extensive experience, and adjusting them based on their advice.  But we would like your input also, as supporters of Educate!.  We look forward to your postings!

most recent ideas

 

Eleven days to go and counting. Things have gotten more intense since Eric and Stacey have got here, as we’ve been trying to cram in countless meetings into our days here; but they have continued to be very helpful and I feel as though we make progress every day.

Although I may not realize this to its full extent now, I feel very blessed to have the opportunity Educate! has given me to learn about development. While I have studied it in the classroom for years, that experience is nothing compared to actually being on the ground and seeing what people are doing first hand. Being a part of this organization has definitely opened a ton of doors for me here and allowed me to have access to a bunch of incredibly intelligent people doing real work on the ground. At my age I think it is definitely a big privilege.

I mentioned in a previous post the two programs we had in mind – school development and community service clubs. Our ideas have continued to change, and there have been some tweaks to these ideas, as well as an additional programming idea that could potentially be the focus of the new programs.

The Educate! community service clubs program actually remains more or less the same. We met again with the headteacher and a teacher leading community service projects at St. Mary’s, and they seemed to have continued interest in being the pilot school to have the club. We are going back later this week to see what kind of structure they have come up with and see how we will move forward.

The school development program idea has changed a bit, and we are going to now only focus on supplementing the current school structure with leadership/social entrepreneurship programs. Because we do not want to impose any ideas or beliefs on a school, as it will most likely result in failed implementation, we are hoping to do this reactively as opposed to proactively. This means that we will support proposals given to us as opposed to coming to a school with a specific program. We are hoping to launch this at a pilot school and are currently in discussions with one school about potential ways to implement a leadership/social entrepreneurship program. Eric addresses this more in his recent post.

Lastly, we have been coming up with a very rough sketch of a leadership training program for older secondary school students separate from current school programs, leading up to a two month leadership and social entrepreneurship institute for students who finished secondary school during their holiday before university (this holiday is 9 months long in Uganda and a time when many students have little to do). We have met a couple times with James Bulenzibuto, who is the public relations officer at Kyambogo University in Kampala and has experience in leadership training, and have sketched out a rough idea of how this would work.

The program would run in three stages. Stage one would be a several hour “sensitization” at various secondary schools, both elite and disadvantaged elite. This would involve introducing students to the concept of leadership and social entrepreneurship, and would be open to the entire population of a secondary school.

Stage two would include a 2 day seminar at this school (or actually more likely a seminar for a batch of several schools) on a weekend, which would go into more depth about the topic and have several speakers who have demonstrated leadership in their fields. Students would only be able to participate by application, and would have to be in their 4^th, 5^th, or 6^th year of secondary school (Ugandan secondary education has 6 levels).

The last and final stage would be a two month institute for students finishing secondary school, and would ideally include several sessions during each pre-university vacation period. The sessions would be part in class learning about leadership, entrepreneurship, social entrepreneurship, and social responsibility, part lectures and talks by successful leader in these fields, and part actual implementation of a project. Students would ideally be a mix of both students from elite institutions and those from highly disadvantaged ones, allowing both an opportunity to network with each other, learn about the other, and hopefully address each others problems in the future.

This opportunity for students of completely different social classes to meet and learn about each other could potentially even have the most value, as the students from elite schools, who are likely to become business and government leaders, will now be connected to students who are likely to become leaders in their communities. Ideally, going forward, the connection they build will be powerful in affecting development from both a macro and micro level.

Again, these are just ideas we have, so please share any thoughts you may have. We are currently working on identifying and meeting with all the people at the forefront of this sort of leadership training and have several exciting meetings set up before we leave. We hope that by the end, we will have a good group of potential advisors on board with the idea. Wish us luck…