One of the most direct ways we help vulnerable children in the area is through our Children’s Home. This Home was set up in 2012 and works closely with the local government and police. We take in children who have been given court orders because they have been abandoned or abused. We try to find them permanent homes either with family members or with members of the local community. We also have an Emergency Aid fund that we use to support vulnerable families, for example paying their children's school fees or helping them to set up an income‐producing project like pig keeping.


Adelante Africa’s Educational Projects


Primary and nursery education


We continue to provide for orphans at St Joseph’s primary school in Igayaza, and have also set up a non-profit nursery school in our nearby children’s home which takes in around 27 children from the Home and another 33 children from the surrounding villages.


Adult education


In 2011 we set up our first F.A.L. (Functional Adult Literacy) group which teaches adults to read and write but also how to set up income generating projects, how to improve agricultural techniques, about health and safe water and the law. As part of this project, we help F.A.L. members to build water tanks for themselves and their neighbours to harvest water from their roofs. In the initial group we had 55 members. There are now over 900 F.A.L. members in ten groups in different villages all over the area.


The Old Cornelian SUMMER 2017


Our Latest Project: The Adelante Africa Secondary School


Secondary education in Uganda is not obligatory, and there is no free secondary education. All children have to pay fees, even in (the very few) government aided schools. It is very difficult for poor children to get a reasonable secondary education unless they are sponsored by an NGO.


Besides which, the vast majority of secondary schools do not offer the children a good education. Classes are huge (often over 100 children in a class and sometimes as many as 200). Many schools have been set up as businesses, where they cram in as many children as possible in order to benefit from the school fees. All children who have passed the exams that they sit at the end of primary education and can pay the fees are accepted. There are some good secondary schools, but they are almost all in big cities like Kampala, Entebbe Fortportal and Hoima. The best schools are mainly Catholic run, often seminaries, and thus only open to boys. Most rural areas have very few, if any, secondary schools that offer the children the possibility of a good secondary education.


I joined the Board of Adelante Africa soon after it was set up and it soon became clear to me that, given my career as teacher of English as a Foreign Language and author of a series of coursebooks (the English File series) my energies could best be channelled into projects in education.


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