Uganda hold’s the world record for closing schools for the longest period due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This week the First Lady (also the Minister for Education) announced that schools will reopen on January 10, 2022.
All schools were closed on March 18, 2020. Some classes returned for a very short stint this year, only to be closed again, but many year groups never returned at all. The first three years of primary school (P1, P2 and P3) are three of the year groups who never stepped foot into a classroom in almost two years. The majority of those children haven’t read or written anything in that period. These are the main year groups READ for Life supports: we train and mentor teachers to improve reading and writing levels in lower primary children.
This is the calm before the storm… before children return to schools and we find out what the carnage of almost two years without formal education looks like and the triage begins.
Dan and Jodes... in Gulu, Uganda 