More than half of all enrolled students in Northern Uganda fail to complete their primary school education, mostly due to poverty that leaves families unable to pay school fees.
Girls face additional cultural barriers that make them far more likely than boys to attend school irregularly or drop out. These include parental expectations that they stay home to help out with chores, pressure to ease family financial burdens by marrying early, unwanted pregnancies, and stigma about menstruation.
Protracted school closures caused by COVID-19 were exponentially harder on girls, leading to an alarming rise in early marriages and pregnancies, a trend district officials are hopeful to change with support from AWR.
Our program was started and continues to grow because of local demand - from women in the program, from schools, and from government officials who all are asking for support with girls education.
AWR’s Girls Education program provides girls with the material, academic, and emotional support they need to succeed in primary school and continue on to secondary school. Working together with parents, caretakers, schools and government officials, we ensure success through individualized academic attention, mentorship, and ongoing parental and community dialogue.
Demand for girls education is high. AWR aspires to have girls education programming in each community where we work. We know that education creates the conditions for success and helps to permanently break the cycle of generational poverty.
Our holistic, high-touch mentor model seeks to create lasting changes to the attitudes, norms and beliefs that keep girls from enrolling and succeeding in school. It begins in Grade 4, when girls are most likely to drop out. The model includes home visits, community dialogue, academic mentorship, materials and supplies, extracurricular and field trip opportunities, and future monetary support to families through tree-planting that will help them pay for secondary school once a girl becomes of age.
"The mentors have made our work easier. They go for home visits. We don’t go unless it’s a critical issue. The mentors find problems before they become major obstacles. They are helping a lot and I truly appreciate the home visits… It also helps that all the mentors are from this area and not strangers. When they go out in the community people listen and trust them."