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When I wrote the story of my young friend Fatuma a few months back I called it the “Audacity of Hope’ It was almost cliché, but it spoke to the life story of a young girl who was living through the pandemic and who against all the odds was making the best of the pandemic, undaunted and unafraid of the challenge ahead of her in her quest of education. I follow up her story with the title of a serendipitous encounter.
So, I ask about her school. She confidently states that she is in P3, at least she had been promoted to P3 when schools were first closed in 2020. She stabs three fingers in the air and beamed with pride and she attempted to say P3 which sounded like ‘sree’. I quickly discover that she has not read a book in a long time.
Welcome to my first mountaineering blog. You may be excused for thinking that I am an experienced mountaineer and therefore, this blog is about my top tips for other enthusiasts, and you will be excused for nearly being right! Having completed my fourth mountain, yes FOUR, I feel justified to associate with mountaineers even if the thought of even attempting the likes of Everest often ends in coughing fits of laughter! The movie Everest was painful enough to watch, I did my part and watched to the end.
If like me, statistics conjures up images of a long-troubled relationship, welcome to this blog. It is written with you in mind. If like me, you begrudgingly, one eye closed, interrogate numbers to make sense of your world, worry not, "I have got you", and even have an emoji to match this sentiment! However, if you were the mathematics genius, skipping all the way to math lesson 001, and you are drawn towards the allure of mathematics in everyday life, seeing the world as Fibonacci, then I have something interesting in store, for you too.
In general, all students in Uganda are ‘learning out of school’ and have varying degrees of access to learning with vastly different home circumstances. The pandemic has introduced a new vocabulary of common phrases into the world of education. We hear of ‘building back better’, ‘learning gaps’, ‘routine assessment based exams’, ‘impact of Covid 19 on attainment' and 'pandemic pregnancies' among many others. Beyond their latent meanings, all the above phrases carve out their position in the 2020 education lexicon.
The World Bank’s analysis of cross-country data on human capital indicates that Uganda is underinvesting in the future productivity of its citizens. Though Uganda’s population is growing everyday, the investment in education remains low. At 2.6 percent of GDP, Uganda’s current budget expenditure on education is the lowest in the region compared to Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi which spend between 3.2% and 5.2%. This is placing Uganda’s future in Jeopardy.
I couldn’t stop thinking about John and his future without an education. But also what an education would mean for a child like John, already so articulate, his mind functioning beyond his age and life.
A year on – it’s just the beginning
A lot has happened in the past year at Tusome Africa, more than I could have imagined. We’ve grown in size, both in terms of staff and volunteers, and also in terms of the schools that we work with.
In our unwavering quest to provide quality education to every child, three years ago, Tusome Africa embarked on a remarkable journey. We set out to establish high-quality but low-cost Early Childhood Education (ECE) centres in three schools nestled within Uganda's Iganga District.