AIA's Holiday Program Empowers Uganda's Youth
Children in Uganda are exposed to some of the greatest threats to their success during school breaks. When schools were closed during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, over 354,000 teenage pregnancies were registered in the country, resulting in huge numbers of school dropouts. Other vices like drug abuse, child abuse and more occur during such school breaks, which is why keeping young people in schools is important. However, school breaks are part of the school calendar and are necessary for children to rest from their normal classroom routine. This creates a dire need to ensure that children are kept safe and productively occupied during school breaks.
Every school break, the Action in Africa Centre opens its doors to the children in Nakuwadde. This year on 15th January 2024, after the New Year holidays, we opened the centre for the Holiday Program. At the end of 2023, we invited children to sign up for free skilling classes during the school holidays. The mobilisation campaign involves our announcer going around the community informing children and parents to come sign up for various skilling programs. The mobilisation is important because it informs the parents of where and what their children are signing up for, it is usually the parents that send their children to come and sign up.
As a result of our mobilisation campaign, over 200 students signed up for the classes, with 100 from primary school (9-13 years) and 160 from secondary school (14-19 years). This year, we introduced some new classes that we had never had before during our holiday program.
One of the students, 16-year-old Sarah Namidde mentioned that she had signed up for the photography class because she loves taking pictures. These new digital skills programs are curated to spark the creativity of our young stars in Nakuwadde in light of the digital revolution that is taking place across the world. Digital skills are so vital for all young people now and in the future, but many schools in Uganda lack the resources and capacity to offer them to students, which is why we have incorporated them into our holiday program. Besides photography and coding, we have also started offering free computer literacy classes for primary students. Impressively, when the registration window was opened, this was the most signed-up-for program by the primary students which goes to show how interested they are in equipping themselves with digital skills.
The holiday program is also intended to keep the children active and entertained, which is why some of our more physical programs are still very relevant, the kiganda dance, urban dance and Zumba classes are still very popular with the students, these are great physical exercises for the students and they instil great cognitive skills. The dance classes are also a huge attraction for students to come to action in Africa because of their obvious cool vibe.
Communication and confidence-building programs are compulsory for all students at the AIA centre, they include; debate (public speaking) classes, book reading programs and creative writing classes. We continue to offer these programs because they are a huge contribution to the academic strength that many of our students exhibit when they go back to school. For example, our recent graduate Shadia mentioned in her story how the debate program impaired her to pursue a career in international relations and diplomacy.
This holiday we’ve introduced free photography and coding (programming) classes and many students signed up for them and were visibly excited about them.
It is a bee hive of activities at the AIA centre during the holiday program, and we love to have our students with us, safe and productively occupied while learning amazing skills that make them awesome people. It is not enough to just take children to school, this program is our way of supporting parents and the community of Nakuwadde to ensure that children stay in school and have more chances of securing employment in the future.
