The holidays are once again upon us and we want to be the first to wish you a Happy Thanksgiving! This year, as ever, we are grateful for YOU - our community of unyielding supporters. If you're a longtime member of the AIA community you know that the holidays are our busiest season. And if you're new here, welcome! Whether new or old, we're so grateful you're here and we hope you'll join us as we dive into the exciting weeks ahead.

Ndagire Joan is one of the University Students on the AIA University scholarship program, she joined the Action in Africa family in 2005 when she was supported at St Johnson primary school, one of our very first partner schools. Today she is at Makerere University where she is soon graduating with an undergraduate degree in Business Administration and majoring in procurement. She took a few minutes from classes to us about her experience as part of the AIA scholarship program.

You have heard a lot about the pipeline of our scholarship program in our previous blog posts; The genesis and evolution of the program, the selection criteria, and the impact of the program on parents and students in the Nakuwadde community, and most recently about the AIA Internship program which is available after graduating from the Secondary Scholarship Program. Well, Action in Africa’s efforts of empowering the community through education continues after the internship program to the new University program. Over the next few blog posts, we will explain to you how that works.

Upon successful completion of Secondary School, students can apply to intern with Action in Africa as a direct pathway to joining our University Scholarship Program. The AIA Internship Program is competitive, only offering 5 slots a year. This 9-month program is an opportunity for students to work with Action in Africa prior to joining University, gaining hard and soft skills to help set them up for success once on campus. This includes public speaking skills, computer classes, resume building, participating in community service projects, budgeting and so much more.

We’re so proud of our Action in Africa team’s management of the recent ebola outbreak in Uganda.

While Uganda experiences periodic outbreaks, the current situation with Ebola in Uganda is concerning. The country has cited a growing number of cases since the outbreak began on September 20.

At Action in Africa, we are monitoring the situation closely and have taken immediate steps to protect the health of our community, staff, and program participants.

I visited Central College and Light Secondary School (my former school!) and interviewed three students who have been on the AIA Secondary Scholarship Program for the last six years! Our wonderful participants have been part of the program since 2016 when they joined secondary school; Jordan, Swabura, and Hakim are all senior six candidates who will be completing their final high school exams in the next two weeks.

2020 started out with a lot of excitement, hope, and plans. We had all written down our year’s resolutions and were all fired up to take on the new decade. Little did we know that we were headed for one of the greatest global challenges ever witnessed. The first case of the COVID-19 virus in Uganda was recorded on March 21st, just weeks after the start of the school term in the country. But by this time, the entire world was already experiencing the first global Pandemic in a century.

Latifah is one of the Action in Africa (AIA) University Scholarship students that has been part of the program since her primary school level, she is likely to graduate this year. In this blog post, we spoke to Mama Latifah in order to give our readers some perspective on how the work of AIA impacts the parents of the children that are supported.