Genesis and Evolution of the AIA Scholarship Program
“The dream was clearer than a memory” Viserys Targaryen (House of the Dragon). Ours wasn't “Clearer than a memory,” the Secondary School Scholarship program has evolved over the years, changing in order to address the right challenges as well as fit into the lessons we have learned from working with the community in Nakuwadde.
In this series of blog posts, we continue to understand the secondary scholarship program, last week we introduced to you the program in our interview with Ms. Christine Olal, Action in Africa’s very own Education Specialist. Now we tell you the story of how it all started and the changes we have made over time.
In the beginning, we started out by supporting other humanitarian organizations in Africa, this had its merits but the efforts were sparse and unsustainable. After a while, we realized that greater impact could be achieved through our own organization dedicated to community empowerment through education, which saw the creation of AIA in Nakuwadde, as an organization that works directly to support the community.
It wasn't always a Secondary Scholarship program though, we started with primary school sponsorships for children that were just starting their education. We, later on, realized that although primary school education was important, supporting secondary education would be more impactful because of the staggering numbers of students that drop out of school after finishing primary and not continuing onto secondary school.
But maybe the most transformative was the shift from sponsorships to a scholarship program, in the sponsorship program, students would directly be supported by donors which was the conventional humanitarian method, but this proved to be unsustainable because of the unstable lives of families in Uganda, a lot of parents would move from the community and the link between them and the sponsors would break. Furthermore, it disempowered the students and their families to take agency of their lives and futures. Now we have a scholarship fund that is more sustainable and enables us to be strategic participants in the academic life of the students and ensure that they stay in school.
The program has grown into a better structure that supports the national free Universal Primary Education program and addresses the challenges of dropping out after finishing Primary school level, a time when children are most at risk of pregnancy, drugs, and all other adolescent challenges that could affect their lives. The AIA scholarship program now supports students all the way through to University but that is a story for another day.
So the dream was not always so clear, but the goal was always to empower communities with Education through the scholarship program, we have and will continuously evaluate the scholarship program to ensure the greatest utility from the support we receive from all over the world to the community.
Watch out for our next blog post, we will interview one of the first parents to benefit from the scholarship program. Until then, Mwelaba! (See you soon)
