Girls Be Strong

Girls Be Strong is a non-profit student organisation dedicated to supporting single mothers and their children, and in Kampala, Uganda we provided educational support for young children and financial help for single mothers.

The line we work under is let girls be girls, not brides.

What we did in Kampala

Over several weeks we provided a school bus to the Hope Hill Learning Center, helped a single mother find employment, and taught young students basic mathematics, English and hand-washing.

During the visit to Hope Hill we also ran a simplified version of a Model United Nations conference, which let the students look at the world from a much wider position than their own — the perspective of national leaders. It was the part of the trip I had least expected to work and the part that worked best. A few months after we came home we invited two students from the centre to visit Korea and experience another culture.

The part that will outlast us

One of the single mothers we worked with now attends Namasuba College of Commerce, where she is studying for a degree in fashion design and textile technology — for her child and for her own future. The school took her into a secure two-year programme built specifically to educate single mothers.

I am deliberately not naming her here. It is her life and her decision who hears about it, and a stranger’s portfolio is not the place for it. What I will say is that a two-year programme is a completely different category of help from anything we could carry in a suitcase, and that being a small part of it is the thing I am proudest of in this entire site.

Why the school bus, of all things

Because attendance is a transport problem before it is an education problem. You can fund a teacher and a classroom and still lose the children to the distance between home and the door. The least romantic item on our list was the one that changed the number of children in the room.

Girls Be Strong keeps going, and so do our friends in Uganda.