Learn How One Donor is Transforming Education for Ugandan Students
Over the years, Whitney Shashou and her husband have donated with unbridled generosity to Action in Africa, including funding earmarked for our university scholarship students’ laptops right before they started their university education. These students have continued to use these laptops for their education, including their exams and classwork. School is much easier for them now since they do not have to spend money on having people type their work for them or use internet cafes or public computers to do their research. We had an opportunity to catch up with Whitney from New York to talk about what inspired her generous donation to our long-standing cause of bridging the digital divide that our community faces.
Whitney has been a long-term friend of both the organization and Sarah Nininger, AIA’s Executive Director. As high school students at Aspen High School in 2006, they were part of the founding members group of the first Action in Africa Students Club. That small student’s club has now morphed into a nonprofit that is supporting the education of hundreds of children in Uganda and provides medical and social services to the community in Nakuwadde, Uganda.
Whitney is also an educator, she studied education at University of Pennsylvania. Her interest and passion for education in Africa were ignited further by her experience studying in South Africa at the University of Cape Town in her junior year, where she even taught high school English at a local public school called Ned Doman. Through this experience, she came to understand first-hand some of the challenges that African children face in education. As an educator she knows that access to digital skills training is indeed vital for all children to obtain digital skills from the earliest age. That is partly why she supported the computer campaign.
According to our Education Programs Manager, Colline Muyodi, none of the primary schools (grades K-6) in Nakuwadde have a computer on their campuses. This means that children in this community only get to access a computer when they join a secondary school (grades 7-12). That is why Action in Africa introduced the teachers’ computer classes as part of its teacher’s training, to help these teachers learn how to use computers so that they are capable of teaching those skills to their students.
“Whitney’s husband also works in tech, and together they understand that the current global trends show that basic technology skills are a vital element of quality education in this day and age. This is what made the computer campaign so endearing for them and inspired their donations. As an educator, Whitney believes that it is important for everyone to do what is possible to not only increase access to foundational education in numerics or literacy for children in Africa but also digital skills that would empower them and make them ready to serve and build their communities to the highest possible standard.”
Action in Africa is working to improve digital infrastructure and offer educational programs. For the month of June, we are raising funds to “Bridge The Digital Divide” in Nakuwadde, Uganda. Your gift to this campaign will directly fund the digital capabilities of our community. It will improve connectivity at the AIA Centre in Nakuwadde and enable collaboration between our US and Uganda teams, fund teacher computer training, provide the first free Digital Bootcamps for children in Nakuwadde and give our university scholarship students ownership of a computer for the first time in their lives.
