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.