Welcome to Kyabirwa Primary School's wonderful Volunteer Project!
Why is our volunteer project wonderful? Because the lives, health and educational standards
of our children have improved so much since volunteers started coming to help us!
Kyabirwa School Volunteer Project is a community based initiative (CBO) near Jinja in Uganda
which offers a safe, happy, inexpensive and reliable volunteering experience to any kind hearted English speaking person who feels inspired to come and help us!
We need volunteers for teaching, community work, sports, building and construction work, carpentry, painting, minor health care - in fact whatever skills you have can be used to benefit our children and the community as a whole. You do not have to be a teacher or teach at all if your strengths lie elsewhere.
Volunteer work is available during the holidays as well as in term time. So you can come here to volunteer at any time of the year.
We take volunteers who are university students both to fulfil modules of their courses or during university vacations to experience a different environment, students in their gap year, people on job or career breaks, retired people, people who simply want a different kind of holiday and even adventurers!
Kyabirwa Primary School is near Bujagali Falls, 4 miles from Jinja, Uganda. The school's budget is less than $2 per child per year yet many prices are more than in Europe and the USA - so this funding doesn't go far! Our experience of the world is very limited because even teachers are poor. We started this project to bring us much needed help from people in the developed world. Volunteers bring us expertise, extensive knowledge and more than anything else their altruism and enthusiasm. They inspire us.
A few years ago, the school was just a few shacks. Then the Uganda electricity company started building a new dam on the Nile. As compensation to the community the shacks were replaced with brick built, tin roofed buildings. Whilst these are an improvement they aren't well built. The concrete floors are too soft, the wooden doors and shutters are flimsy and the roofs were not properly sealed. The windows aren’t glazed so red dust blows in all the time.
This new dam means that the famous Bujagali Falls have been drowned and many former tourist activities such as white water rafting no longer exist. The small infrastructure of tourist services that grew up around the Falls has suffered. Local people have lost this extra source of income generation.
The Head Teacher of Kyabirwa Primary School is Robinah Musakira. One of our 17 teachers, Moses Owino, is our Volunteer Project Manager.
There's an average of 1000 children at the school, with classes ranging from 45 to 200 pupils. Numbers vary throughout the year depending on families' finances and children being needed for farming.
Rural schools such as ours are the poorest in Uganda, but due to the buildings ours doesn’t look too bad. However, without this project we would have a total lack of resources and, even with it, basic resources are still very scarce. The average income in Uganda is £300 p.a. half the average for sub Saharan Africa. Our childrens' parents, all subsistence farmers, earn less than £7 a month.
Many of our pupils are orphans or partial orphans. Average life expectancy is 48. AIDS means that Uganda has about 1.5 million of orphans. Orphans or children unable to live with their parents are the least privileged in the extended family. They go to poor schools such as ours. They are the last to benefit in the home, do more chores than the parents' natural children, so are tired and less able to concentrate.
Parents must provide uniforms, textbooks and stationery, resulting in their being unable to send all the children to school at the same time. It tends to be one child this year and another the next so there are adults of 18 still trying to finish primary school. Of those who find the money to start secondary school, some are still trying to complete it at the age of 28. Most who start have dropped out by the end of Year 2. They need to complete at least Year 4 of secondary education to be accepted for an apprenticeship.
Uganda Schools have very few teaching and learning resources. In our school resources don’t even begin to fill a small room. The school only has about 150 donated reading/storybooks. Textbooks are expensive so often 5 children have to share one, consequently pupils spend most of their time copying from the board.
Teachers non contact time is for marking and planning. Can you imagine marking 47 - 200 books per lesson? Our poor funding means teachers have few basic supplies such as pens, blue tak and board dusters.
Despite everything, our teachers are very positive. Their relationships with the children are jovial and caring. Their only regret is that they can’t give the children individual or group time. At Kyabirwa Primary School we use positive reinforcement and small awards to encourage effort and good behaviour. Our children are well behaved, fun and have studious work habits.
Before the volunteer project started most children didn’t get lunch so their concentration was poor especially in the afternoons, but now free porridge is provided for every child.
Teachers lunches and the children's free lunch time porridge are prepared in the new kitchen which was built by volunteers. Many thanks to those past volunteers who fund raise to provide the porridge. It has made a huge difference to our pupils' ability to concentrate in the afternoons and to their health generally.
There isn’t a school hall so assembly is on the field where the children can’t sit because the grass is wet. The small school office has old and sparse furniture some of which is broken. Teaching and Learning resources are pitifully few.
With all these difficulties we need your moral and physical support. That's why we have this volunteer project. Coming to work with us either in the School or the Community lifts our morale, provides us with extra 'man' power, innovations and ideas and gives us contact with the wider world that we wouldn't otherwise have. Just by coming to us with good hearts, you help us enormously.
These are the priorities for the development of our school:
Now that we have electricity in a few rooms, we desperately need more laptops so that we and volunteers can provide IT lessons for the children (and teachers!) Secondhand laptops are fine as long as they have Windows XP or later, Microsoft Office and sound batteries as plug points are limited and there are frequent power cuts!This is a prioritised list but we are grateful for whatever you bring.
- Finish building the teacher's accommodation so that teachers can live at the school and have more time to spend helping children after school and supervising extra-curricular activities and start evening classes for children and the community.
- Teaching and learning resources. Please see lists compiled by teachers on the Volunteer Documents page. Please don't bring text books from your home country as they won't be suitable for our curriculum or match with existing resources. Text books may be ordered and purchased from the Uganda Bookshop in Jinja. Just consult the Head Teacher and Project manager who will help you.
Finish the shelving project so that every classroom has them.
Metal doors and shutters for 4 classrooms. Wooden ones don't last long in this climate. These can be purchased individually or as a whole. We have managed to replace many now - thanks to this project
Second hand Laptops and Digital Cameras for IT skills for pupils and teachers as well as making materials for teaching. Our Project Manager desperately needs a 'new for him' working laptop with MS Office for running the project. Please see the How you can help page.
We need many smaller items which are listed on the How you can help and Help our Girls pages. Donors don't need to supply all of some needed items. A donor could supply just a few items of the science equipment we need, or 5 or 10 text books or part of any of the other categories. It all adds up!
But please don't think that you have to donate if you come to volunteer!
We are deeply grateful for the help we receive, but most of all we are just very glad that volunteers care enough to travel so far to come to be with us. It has changed our outlook completely by raising our spirits and enlarging our hearts. Thank you all a million times!
All the photos on this website are provided by our volunteers and taken during their time here.
Read on to the Volunteer Project page to learn how we are continuing to use this project to help our children and ourselves - and how YOU too might help by volunteering at our school.