The new school year has recently begun in Uganda, making clear the increasing difficulties of the primary school system. Although the country has seen a significant increase in school enrolment rates in recent years, this trend is now reversing and the number of school dropouts and early school leavers is on the rise again especially among the most disadvantaged population groups.
The difficult international situation plays a part in this: the conflict in Ukraine has disrupted some global supply chains, particularly in the agriculture and energy sectors on which Uganda is heavily dependent. Ukraine has always been an important supplier of wheat, maize and sunflower oil, and the rising prices of these commodities directly affect the lives of the poorest families, often forced to choose between giving food or schooling to their children.
Even in the slum of Katwe, on the outskirts of the capital Kampala, where there is a School of Peace of the Community, several children had dropped out of school and had been forced to beg or work to support their families. Families mainly from the north-west of the country, i.e. from the border areas with South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo, live in the vast agglomeration of shacks. The uncertainty caused by the ongoing conflicts in these countries, in fact, push the populations to move south and find refuge in the capital.
The Schools of Peace in Kampala - in the neighbourhoods of Katwe, Nakulabye/Makerere, Muyenga and NtindIn - and the one further north, in the city of Lira, stand as a curb to this drift and a response to the children's desire to continue studying, to their dream of having a dignified future. ‘I want to be a teacher’, “I want to be a peacemaker” they write: these are the dreams for their future and the school is the means to realise them.
That is why at the start of the new school year, the children of the Schools of Peace received all the necessary equipment to go back to school. A gift that aroused enthusiasm in the little ones and encouraged the families, who realised that they are no longer alone in facing the task of helping their children to secure a future.
