To empower children and families in rural Uganda to overcome the constraints of poverty through education and business development. 

Thriving, financially independent communities in rural Uganda.

Goal One: This is in line with our commitment to fostering meaningful, sustainable impact, which cannot be achieved if we are not nimble and cannot meet the current and evolving needs of communities.

Goal Two: We cannot achieve our mission and sustainable change for our communities if we do not have the human and financial resources to effectively design, manage and monitor programs.

Goal Three: If we can raise awareness of needs and mobilize support, we can better help communities realize their vision of a brighter future marked by opportunity, self-sufficiency, and improved wellbeing.

RWA has a demonstrated commitment to investing in leadership development through various avenues. However, restrictions resulting from the COVID pandemic – particularly severe in Uganda – required us to change our approach to leadership development over the last couple of years. In place of the traditional leadership development programs and activities we have typically employed (e.g., an organization-wide, week-long professional development training in Prosocial Development, a Nobel Prize-winning model for building healthy, engaged and high performance teams), we instead allocated a portion of our total Ugandan budget to be utilized more flexibly toward development. Consequently, staff have been able to participate in various opportunities (as individuals or as a group), that they themselves identified as pertinent and helpful (with head office approval). These opportunities included skill-building, technical training, and on-site program consulting and shadowing.

Like the rest of the world, RWA and our partner communities have been deeply affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Particularly stringent national regulations in Uganda required us to drastically adapt our work so as to be able to continue helping our partner communities during a particularly challenging time. To adhere to government restrictions, we dramatically reduced our program class size – from 40 participants to 9 or fewer. And, though it was already within the same county, we moved our offices closer to our partner communities to mitigate any potential travel restrictions across sub-county lines that could potentially separate staff from programming. We also adapted programming itself to help weather pandemic-related challenges that left our communities struggling – even more than usual – to meet basic needs. For example, we pivoted from supporting student livestock projects to providing school supplies and expanding our lunch program. This allowed us to address the rising people and animal food insecurity resulting from job losses, inflated food prices due to supply chain disruptions, and periodic swine flu outbreaks that affected livestock. We also refocused resources to provide school supplies to curb the unprecedented tide of school dropouts when so many families were forced to redirect and redistribute their own resources. Lastly, in line with our commitment to both vocational training and to sustainable community development, we adapted our Collegiate Education Training Program to incorporate additional healthcare training and scholarships, resulting in 11 new future nurses that can help communities through the ongoing COVID crisis and mitigate the effects of future pandemics. Importantly, this adaptation and new training is already benefitting the communities, who are currently facing a devastating Ebola outbreak.