Ugandan school, Project Shelter Wakadogo, which supports vulnerable and hard to reach children, has been named one of the top 10 schools globally by World’s Best School Prizes in the Overcoming Adversity category.
The category recognises that adversity will come in many forms for schools, including conflict, climate-related disasters, poverty, or a pandemic.
It assesses how the school builds character, both individually and as a community, to support the greater resilience of all students.
Wakadogo was founded in 2009 in the aftermath of two decades of civil war and violence committed by the Lord’s Resistance Army in northern Uganda, which displaced over a million people.
The school, which is located in Pece Acoyo in Gulu District, has grown from two classrooms to serve over 450 students and currently has one of the highest student retention rates in the country.
At the onset of the pandemic, Uganda, like many other countries around the world, faced government-imposed lockdowns, which adversely affected the running of major sectors, including education.
With less than 9% of the rural population having access to the internet, many schools could not continue with other learning models but the team at Project Shelter Wakadogo was determined to continue providing education to their students.
They developed a home-schooling programme and distributed learning kits and government study modules to students to support face-to-face learning, led by the teachers.
By the end of the lockdown, they had conducted over 36,000 door-to-door lessons.
The decision to run this programme was critical, particularly for girls, because school closures across Uganda saw children forced into the labour market, a rise in teenage pregnancy, and gender-based violence. The result is the need to prepare and plan for hybrid learning.
If they win the prize, Project Shelter Wakadogo will use the funds to set up an online learning platform to facilitate hybrid and catch-up learning, in case schools should ever close again and share its approach and technology with schools in the region.
The school’s head teacher Odong Charles Kigundi, says it is a great honour for Wakadogo to feature among the top nominees for the World’s Best School Prizes.
The World’s Best School Prize is a project by T4 Education, a global organisation committed to providing engaging tools, initiatives, and events for teachers to improve education.
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