Teachers need your help

This is potentially the most important post we will write all year.

READ for Life, our new organisation, is expanding quite rapidly. Expanding in work and scope, rather than revenue. We currently employ three Ugandan teachers and next year would like to employ another, to focus primarily on nursery schools and co-teach in our nursery teacher’s training college we are opening.

Traditionally, child sponsorship is a popular form of giving, particularly to developing communities. However I am asking for a different type of support: not to support one child in their education, but to support teacher trainers to support hundreds of teachers, and in turn thousands of children.

What we at READ for Life are trying to do is to support the teachers in these schools. We specialise in teacher training. We train and mentor local teachers to improve the quality of their teaching, which should transfer to the classroom and improve children’s education outcomes.

We are actively working with hundreds of teachers in about 70 local nursery and primary schools in Gulu area. But our work doesn’t stop in Gulu, we have teachers travelling from across the country from different districts to attend our training and we have had requests to travel to other districts but we are limited by our manpower and resources.

We’ve watched our teachers improve and we have seen the results on paper. In one government school we trained this year: P3 (about year 2 level) pupils were reading an average of 6 words per minute at the end of term one (before training). We trained teachers at the start of term 2, they implemented, we followed them up, then at the end of term 2 that same class was reading an average of 27 words per minute. One term later they are now reading at 38 words per minute. And that’s just after working with them for two terms! Local teachers’ ability to teach literacy is improving and children are getting better at reading and writing – it really is exciting!

We need about £6,500 (AUS$11,400) to pay four teacher trainers for one year. That includes their wages and transport costs for them to travel from school to school in the Gulu area for trainings and observations.

If 36 people donated £15 a month (AUS$26) then we would have enough to fund staff wages for the year.

We already have three great Ugandan teachers and I have my eye on a fantastic nursery teacher who is willing to come on board. She just finished her school year and wants to volunteer with us until I can “cook something up for her”. I told her I’m cooking!

Please consider carefully if you would be willing to come on board and support us in this journey. You won’t be able to pin that picture up of a particular sponsor child on your fridge; however I will happily send you photos of our teacher trainers, the teachers they are working with, and in turn the children they are teaching.

I have updated our donations page so you can make donations directly to our work with READ for Life.

Tax deductible donations can be made from the UK, US, Australia, EU, and donations can also be received from New Zealand (not tax deductible though).