SPAU

SPAU in partnership with Advantage Africa conducted a 5-day residential training last week, on Memory Work for single parent leaders across selected SPAU areas of operation in central Uganda. The training was intended to equip resourceful single parent leaders with skills to enable them to build a foundation for enhanced responses to HIV/AIDS in their communities through better preparation for future challenges in life in a set of programs known as “Memory Work”.

Memory Work is a community approach to address fundamental issues around HIV communication in the family which focuses on: improving communication between guardians and parents living with HIV and their children; disclosing HIV status and other important information; succession planning and writing important family history in a memory book.

More news on this development to follow soon…

Advantage Africa partners: Paul, Sarah and Zack, are away on a week-long workshop with other Advantage Africa development actors across East Africa, intended to equip participants with skills to strengthen community responses to HIV/AIDS and disability in their operational areas.

Two of Uganda Reflex Trustees, Ms. Hannah Turpin and Mr. Rob Berry are in Uganda on a short, intense working visit to SPAU projects in Kampala and Masaka districts. Besides routine familiarisation with the projects and the people, this visit is also intended to equip a group of single parent women involved in a crafts-making project with new skills to enable them produce superior products that can compete favourably on both a national and international market range. Uganda Reflex is a U.K. based charity organisation that provides assistance to SPAU to combat poverty and deprivation through supporting community minded and self-sustaining income generating projects for single parent groups in Uganda.

Happy New Year!!!

We are grateful to God who has kept us all through 2008 and brought us unto yet another year, 2009. This December, SPAU shall be making exactly 10 years(!) of existence. We are so excited to be here at this moment.

SPAU’s mandate remains to empower poor and marginalised single parents and their families to increase their household incomes and provide a forum for single parents to campaign for the advancement of their rights. SPAU currently supports at least 1,700 single parents directly across 4 districts in Uganda -Kampala, Luwero, Masaka and Wakiso – with income generating projects, skills empowerment opportunities and HIV/AIDS education to enable them to overcome conditions of poverty and disadvantage in their lives.

Contact us here to find out more about what we do.

We wish you a God-blessed New Year!

The AIDS epidemic is a global emergency that affects people in every country on earth. December 1st is internationally recognised as the international World AIDS Day. On this day, people from around the world come together within a single effort to focus on global shared action and raising public awareness on specific issues related to HIV and AIDS. These issues include the importance of fighting stigma and discrimination and the disproportionate impact of AIDS on women and girls. The fight against AIDS is over twenty five years old.

SPAU was profiled on the international World AIDS Campaign website for its activities to mark the last World AIDS Day. See full article here. Under the “Take the Lead” theme, SPAU challenged development actors and ordinary folk alike to challenge HIV and AIDS discrimination. By the end of the day, 200 people had risen up to the challenge, making their pledges on paper to challenge HIV/AIDS discrimination over the next 12 months in their daily activities. This year’s World AIDS Day theme is “Leadership”. Do something to STOP AIDS today.

Within the SPAU operational area in Wakiso district, HIV/AIDS has joined a host of other factors –such as extreme poverty and child exploitation– to impose additional burdens on society’s youngest, most vulnerable members.  Cooperaid Director, Dr. Rao Satapati, recently visited SPAU to review progress of the Memory Work project in Wakiso and prepare joint plans for the sustainable care of the program’s identified orphans and vulnerable children from among 4 villages, through supporting & strengthening community-led responses to offer child-support.  If successful, this new program shall seek to support the the communities seriously affected by HIV/AIDS in assisting the most vulnerable children and households, regardless of the specific causes of the children’s vulnerability, to overcome these negative factors.

Through the Kampala Community Empowerment Project (KCEP), SPAU worked in partnership with CONCERN Worldwide from 2005 – 2008 in the implementation of a service project to improve the socio-economic living conditions of poor and marginalised single paresnts from among 18 zones in Rubaga division, Kampala district.

CONCERN Worldwide is a voluntary non-governmental organisation devoted to the relief, assistance and advancement of peoples in need in less developed areas of the world. CONCERN’s mission is to help people living in absolute poverty achieve major improvements in their lives which last and spread without ongoing support from CONCERN.

The CONCERN-SPAU project came to a close in 2008 and SPAU Director and overall project manager, Paul Lwanga, said of the project: “This project (targeted) the poorest group of people…we have supported at least 1,000 single parents in the project area access better and closer services, to enable them move another rung up the socioeconomic ladder of their lives…”

Download entire version (Message from Director) of Paul’s statement on the project.

Single Parents Association of Uganda (SPAU) has for the past seven years been supporting an orphan care programme in Muzinda, a small village in Nsangi sub-county. The programme brings together various single parents to care for orphans and other vulnerable children within the same village in a community-based initiative. SPAU encourages the support for community-led initiatives to care for the children as opposed to institutionalised support (e.g. in orphanages) because the former is a less expensive strategy, strengthens the community dynamic in the orphan care program and also reduces chances of alienating and consequently stigmatising the children.

This month, some of those children are joining hands with fellow youth from in and around the same village to implement a service project in their community under a Global Youth Service Day (GYSD) initiative that is being implemented in Uganda by Irene Mutumba’s Private Education Development Network (PEDN). This youth service project is geared at reducing malaria incidence in Muzinda village and thus contribute to making the village safer from malaria cause, and by extension reduce the cases of school absenteeism among the school-going children, due to malaria illness. The culmination event of this service project is slated to take place on Global Youth Service Day, April 27th 2008, when the children and youth shall highlight their activities in the service week to parents, caretakers, guests and residents of the village at an afternoon ceremony and encourage them to take up arms too, in their struggle to create a malaria-free village.

Download entire PEDN GYSD – Muzinda press release (pdf).

Read an online blog account of the 2008 GYSD – Muzinda preparations.

The Guernsey funded project saw some of its first fruit come into season last month when at least 100 children between the ages of 3 – 10 walked through the doors of the new school building to begin the new school term. Long-serving teacher of the pre-existing nursery school, Ms. Jacqueline Nakyeyune (also popularly called “aunt Jackie” by her class) was on hand to receive them. Read more about Jacqueline’s inspirational strory here (pdf file). U.K. project partner, Advantage Africa together with SPAU began to implement this project in late 2006 with the construction first, of a 6-classroom block and then later an office block and then sanitary facilities. The aim of this project was to support the local community of mostly single parents in Bajjo-Bombo to provide a pre-primary and primary school education to a target 300 vulnerable children so as to enable them achieve their potential. Many of these children have had to contend with walking up to 10 miles each day to and from the nearest government-supported school to receive an education, in addition to helping their parents/guardians at home with the household chores each morning before they go to school and afternoon/evening when they return. This is particularly hard for the youngest children. The new school in their community will now enable these children and others like them in the nearest communities to channel more time and energy into their school work and also more productive activities at home as a result of attending a much nearer school to home.

Currently at the Bajjo-Bombo community school:

• Ongoing nursery/pre-primary school classes and primary classes from p.1 – p.3.
• A new school management committee has been elected to steer the development of the school.
• Three new teachers have been appointed to serve with Jacqueline, at the new school.

According to Mr. Zack Lwanga, SPAU monitoring and evaluation coordinator, the bigger challenge for the community school now is meeting the strict requirements set by the district education council “in the shortest time possible” for the school to be short-listed for government support . “Because,” Zack argues, “it is certainly not feasible that we (the charity) shall be able to support the school operations now for longer than a year, as that would firstly impose on us quite heavily financially, but it would also be a shift from our core work of supporting poor communities to empower themselves. In addition, it is also the responsibility of the government to educate its citizens, so in our bid to achieving school sustainability, we shall certainly not tire of reminding the government in this case of the need to fulfil its role, where incidentally half of the work has already been cut out for it.” To achieve the same end, the SPAU team have already been to see the Luwero L.C.V Chairman, Mr. Ronald Ndaula, on at least 3 separate occassions and the district education council over the same matter of ensuring that the school becomes government aided within the near future.

The school has begun. And in the first parents’ meeting at the school, the same parents agreed to contribute a small fee per child towards the sustenance of the school for the time being. However, most of the parents are also very poor and as a result less than 20% have so far managed to meet the full fee determined five weeks into the school term. So once again, the school faces the challenges of poor teacher facilitation (i.e. by way of teaching materials, school stationery, etc…) to carry out their roles effectively. This does not deter more children from joining the school however, as at the time of writing this, Jacqueline had just communicated to Paul (SPAU Director) on phone that they had registered their 144th new entrant that morning and so some of the children are having to sit on papyrus mats in their new classroom because they cannot all fit on the few available desks. Although most of these children are looked after by single parents, the new school is open to everyone and therefore shall benefit children from all families in the same area and its surroundings.