Our Objective:

 

KICVOP wants to provide affordable education at a subsidized tuition fee (school fees) to enable the less privileged children in the community of Kazo. These children should al get access to school for their basic education (Primary level education).

 

Our Dream:

 

To establish a community-owned non-profit Kindergarten and Primary School and enrich literacy levels of children in the community through a community library

 

The School Project in Kazo:

 

Most of the children living in the suburbs of Nansana and the neighboring villages like Kazo. These areas are urbanizing at a very fast speed accounting for over 144,000 persons in 6 parishes (wards) with Kazo (6 villages/cells) taking the biggest share of this at approximately 38,000 people. In this, the areas are faced with street children and school dropouts at a tender age, child labor issues which lead children into a vulnerable state of early marriages (boys and girls), pregnancies for girls, immature deaths and or indulging in criminality for survival. Of late in Uganda, they have also become a target for human trafficking and human organ harvesting.

 

Nansana Division (formerly Nansana Town Council) accounts for more than 52 percent of the vulnerable children in Wakiso district. According to the education sector plan and guideline, each village should have 1 government aided primary school and a set of villages forming a parish or ward should have 1 government aided secondary. In this case Kazo with its 6 villages has 2 government aided primary schools that are meant to support these vulnerable groups access primary basic education.

 

The schools accommodate over 1580 (980 and 600) children from lower primary to upper primary. You can imagine that this is very overwhelming for the few teachers who are never able to attend to each child. The schools have challenges of understaffing, no teachers’ quarters (accommodation), low and late salary pay and attending to overwhelming numbers of children in class, ratio being 100 pupils for one teacher in one class.

 

The biggest problem faced by the vulnerable families with children at the age of going to school is, reaching the standard requirements of the education institutions. To mention are the pre-stated numbers of books, toilet tissues, brooms, reams of papers, pencils (and much more) and a mandatory pre-paid percentage lump sum amount of school fees for both government and private community aided schools. Families are left in a contradicting loyalty on whether to buy these requirements or pay school fees basically because of the big numbers of children that might be belonging to a household.

 

It is in this regard that KICVOP – Uganda saw it justifiable to establish a community private, but not-for-profit school of its own! We will be able to attend to the needs of these vulnerable children and also respond to the growing number of applications submitted everyday. This will be possible to the sponsorship department through the KICVOP office in Kazo.

 

Other than it being a community owned non-profit private school, KICVOP intends to introduce an individual household needs based approach as opposed to the general school needs approach applied by all existing both government and community private profit – making schools.

 

Our Commitment and Promise to the Community of Kazo:

 

We will provide this quality education to the children by of Kazo;

 

1. Prioritizing members of the community of Kazo during all processes of recruitment and staffing.

 

2. Employing qualified and ensuring continued payment of agreeable amounts to the staff. Lobbying or advocating for manageable or cost friendly timely capacity building. This will ensure trainings and knowledge exchange between the project staff and the outside world.

 

3. Eliminate all unnecessary costs. This means asking parents to buy only what is needed by the children for school and also only purchasing what is needed by the school to operate.

 

4. Cutting costs on school requirements will lessen the burden put onto these vulnerable families by the existing entities. The school management committee (from the community) and KICVOP shall allow these vulnerable families to contribute directly and indirectly to the school. Since quality of education is not only guaranteed by what the children receive and by whom, but also how, where and when, eliminating absenteeism of both teaching staff and the children from school would also ensure provision of quality education at a low cost.