| The proposed Bwera Vocational Secondary School and Community Cultural Centre Project has been designed to address the need for education in a severely impoverished rural community of western Uganda. This particular project was identified as essential by community members through a collaborative consultation process. The School and Community Centre will provide free secondary school enrolment and vocational training for HIV orphans and other disadvantaged youth, providing new opportunities, support, and a greater sense of stability in the region. The project builds on an existing vocational secondary school project, in which Partnerships for Opportunity has been involved since 2005, in collaboration with Cobra Association for Life Improvement, a local Ugandan non-profit. |
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| For this project, Partnerships for Opportunity intends to construct a permanent school building to replace the existing temporary, makeshift school buildings that are currently used to run existing programs. The new five-room building will accommodate upwards of 800 students. It will be constructed from simple plans designed by a local Ugandan architect. The building will be fitted with a simple solar panel lighting system in order to provide light in the evenings for adult learning initiatives and other community activities, in its secondary role as a Community Cultural Centre. Ownership of the building will be held by the community as a collective body, with administrative and facility-care duties overseen by the Cobra Association. In order to finance the construction, train teachers, construct the schoolyard, and provide educational resource materials, seed funds will be raised in Canada. The project has been designed so that after this initial implementation period, it will be financially independent, entirely supported by local income-generating projects developed through ongoing collaboration between Cobra Association for Life Improvement and Partnerships for Opportunity. |
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This project builds on the Vocational School projects that we have been helping to develop since 2005.
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Background
Since our first visit to Bwera in 2005, two vocational secondary schools have been founded in the community. These schools were created to address the problems of extreme poverty and HIV-orphaned children. The young people who attend these schools would not otherwise be able to get a secondary school education because school fees at government secondary schools are prohibitive. Because many of the students have lost their parents, they have not had role models from whom to learn life and vocational skills. A ciriculum is therefore developing to teach the students the skills necessary for a success in life after school.
The schools are subsidized by the beekeeping project and other community projects allowing the over 1,300 students to attend free of charge. The students learn all subjects of the standardized government curiculum and sit national exams. They also have the added benefit of learning vocational skills as learning materials permit. During the summer of 2007 Partnerships for Opportunity helped move one of the schools to its own recently aquired land. We have also been able to buy a full set of textbooks for each school as teaching resources for the staff members. Currently, the buildings are very rudimentary in nature, constructed of sticks and woven papyrus mats, and metal roofs. We are now undertaking a construction project to rebuild one of the schools.
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