Uganda's First Self-Sufficient School Project!

A lot of progress and a little Good Bye...

2010-03-20T00:32:00.000-07:00

Another month of great progress here at St. Denis.

The construction work at the school is finished and our four businesses are ready for some serious profit:

The cow shelter has a concrete floor which will make sure our cows will stay dry during the coming rainy season. Also, there now is a fence which will hopefully stop our cows wandering off into places like the computer room again (see December Blog).

The Matooke plantation too is in a great shape. We have purchased additional tools which will enable the students to participate more in Matooke related activities.

The great news for those two businesses is also that we finally managed to acquire more land for the school from Makondo parish. Therefore we will be able to extend the Matooke plantation and plant more elephant grass for our cows!

For the computer business our friends from IYH who are visiting St. Denis at the moment brought some good news too: IYH has decided to fund the relocation of the computer business to new premises in the neighbouring village. The funding will be provided for one year which will hopefully be enough time to make the new business profitable.

Our final business, the school supply shop, is ready to open: The shop has been constructed and will be opening for business next week! Students and staff are equally excited about this new service at the school and are keen to use it soon.

Unfortunately my 6 months here at St. Denis have now come to an end. I really enjoyed the work and therefore I will be sad to leave Makondo this Sunday…

But the bad news ends here: We found a fantastic replacement! Jamie Clearfield will from now on be the Project Officer at St. Denis. She is true East Africa expert and I am confident she will do a great job!

Jamie and I spent the past 2 weeks working alongside each other to make sure she knows everything about the projects and procedures here at St. Denis. We also visited some of the Send a Piglet Home Beneficiaries – by now all pigs from the first distribution are pregnant and piglets from the second distribution are developing very well!

My time here ended with another arrival: Maria Camp from Into Your Hands, our partner NGO at St. Denis has arrived for a 2 weeks visit. After 6 months of communicating via email it was great to finally meet her.

IYH and TAMTF staff (Fr. Kasoma, Jamie, Maria Camp, Justine, Christina and James)

After a lovely leaving function for me and welcoming function for Jamie I am now set to go! I would like to take this opportunity to say thank you to the staff and students at St. Denis who always were so cooperative and fun to work with - I will miss you!

I also wish Jamie all the best for her year here at St. Denis. I am convinced that she will have a great and successful time!

Tusisikane! We will meet again!

Happy New Year…

2010-02-13T05:00:00.000-08:00

The New Year 2010 started off well for the self sufficiency project at St. Denis as we received a substantial amount of funding! Funds will be used for our existing dairy and matooke business as well as help to establish two new projects - a school supplies shop and canteen as well as a posho mill. Truly a great start to the New Year!

Before the start of term I travelled to Kenya to visit another TAMTF project in Ondati near Kisumu. The project, the area’s first all girls school, aims to provide quality education for underprivileged girls. The project is quite different from St. Denis as the school has been set up at the same time as the businesses were started. Thanks to Mary, Ondati’s project officer, the school has the right structures in place whereas it still lacks many infrastructure necessities. St. Denis on the other hand has the infrastructure needed but required much work on internal structures to deal with businesses. Therefore there was much to learn from Mary’s project, and we are hoping that Kenya – Uganda exchanges can become a regular part of both projects in the future.

In the meanwhile here at St. Denis School has started and as students are returning we are busy preparing for the next months. We have been planning and budgeting for our first finance transfer and over the next six weeks we have ambitious plans with those funds: We will construct a school canteen which is planned to open for business around Easter. We will renovate the cow shelter and construct a much needed fence around the cow paddock. The students will help us to plant Calliandra as nutritious food supplement for our cows. Through purchasing desperately needed equipment for our Matooke plantation we also want to include the students more in the day to day running of the plantation – which will also help to improve the quality of our bananas.

Although both, our computer business centre and dairy business have registered a small profit last month, we are convinced to be able to improve the businesses performance. In case of the dairy business we hope to achieve this through focusing even more on the cow’s nutrition. In case of the computer business we are currently checking the possibility of relocating the business to Kyamucama, a nearby village which is easier accessible for our customers than the school.

Our partner NGO, Into Your Hands, has over the Christmas holidays relocated their office from Makondo to Kyamucama where they are now enjoying electricity and internet which improved operations enormously.

Thanks to Into Your Hands, the school’s library is now equipped with bookshelves – so the only thing lacking now is…books! Books though are on their way, in the next 5 months we are expecting book donations from Into Your Hands, Book Aid and READ. The boy’s dormitory, also funded by Into Your Hands is also nearly finished. In the past week electricity has been installed and windows and doors have been fitted.

And finally, we are eagerly awaiting the arrival of our new Entrepreneur Teacher at St. Denis. S3 students at St. Denis will from this year on have a new Entrepreneurship Course to introduce them to principles and practice of Business Management. TAMTF has prepared lesson plans to supplement the national curriculum to ensure the students will benefit as much as possible from the new subject.

Merry Christmas...

2009-12-20T05:09:00.000-08:00

Christmas holidays are in full swing, and with all the students gone school has gotten terribly quiet. The last few weeks have nevertheless seen some great progress.

At the end of November I travelled to Kampala to visit an organisation called ‘Private Education Development Network’ (www.pedn.org). Amongst other things they specialise in training teachers to deliver entrepreneurship courses for students and we are hoping that there will be potential for cooperation in the future.

Our three self sufficiency businesses have also produced their first monthly financial report which revealed some very interesting facts:

1. The dairy business output has almost doubled over the past month, and as we were able to find more customers for our milk our earnings have increased substantially. However, because of the high vet costs we incurred during the past month due to the birth of baby bull Charles and the injury of one of our other cows the business made a small loss in November. We are confident though that this will turn into profit over the next months as we are continuing our sales efforts.

2. The computer business recorded a small profit. This however excluded the cost of the Internet as this is currently funded by our partner organisation Into Your Hands. Nevertheless this is a great success considering that there is so much potential for growth at the St. Denis Computer Business Centre. In fact the good news spread so fast that even one of our smallest members of the self sufficiency project came to visit…little Masembe, our second calf decided to pay the Computer Business Center a visit one day.

3. The records also clearly show that the Matooke plantation is finally recovering from the drought, and output has in November grown to 16 bunches – a number which we are expecting to grow further over the next months.

Another main activity in these past few weeks was to carry out a baseline survey in order to collect baseline data about secondary students in the area. By comparing St. Denis student’s data to the data collected from students from other schools, we are hoping that over time there will be a distinct difference enabling us to measure the impact of the self sufficiency project. The students were excited about this for Uganda very unusual activity and some students were even trained as interviewers to conduct the surveys on behalf of TAMTF.

I will be back in Makondo at the end of January as I am travelling to Kenya. There I will meet up with Mary, the project officer for Kenya’s first self sufficient school for girls in Ondati, to find out all about her project and to share experiences.

As I am now wrapping up my activities here in Makondo in preparation for my Christmas holidays in Austria there is just one thing left to say:

MERRY CHRISTMAS AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR 2010!

More new arrivals...

2009-11-19T00:58:00.000-08:00

Over the past month there have been many new developments here at St. Denis Secondary School!

Our S4 students have finished their O-Levels (GSCEs) and are now enjoying their newly gained freedom. S1 – S3 are still in full exam mode working hard to achieve good marks for their end of year examinations, but they too are looking forward to finishing them at the end of this week.

The month of November started with the arrival of Charles, a healthy bull who has joined our dairy business family. Now that Charles is old enough and does not depend on his mother’s full milk supply anymore, our milk production has increased substantially. Although this is great news, we now need to investigate new markets in the surrounding villages in order to ensure there are enough customers for our milk.

In order to make sure our cows continue to be well cared for, the agriculture club has planted nutritious elephant grass all across the school premises. The grass, which takes around 6 months to grow, will be a great supplement to the cow’s nutrition and will further contribute to improving the milk production. Although this was an important step in the right direction, there is more work to be done and more grass to be planted in order to ensure that we can supply each cow with enough feed. Therefore we are planning to plant even more grass over the next month and we will also investigate the possibility of acquiring more land for this.

Next to planting grass, the students have done a lot of work on the cow’s shelter, removing weeds and other hiding places for potentially dangerous insects and replacing the soil in the shelter which also will contribute towards the cow’s well being. Some students applied some very creative means in order to speed up the progress of removing the weeds…

The ‘Send a Piglet Home’ (SAPH) programme too has lots of new arrivals to report. Six pigs have had piglets over the past month and a further eight pigs are pregnant! This is good news for those SAPH beneficiaries who will soon be able to sell the piglets and pay for essential supplies for them and their families.

Godfrey Kalungi, the SAPH project coordinator, is very pleased with the progress and is positive about the successful growth of the project. 30 new beneficiaries have been selected, 10 of which have already received their piglets.

The school’s Computer Business Centre has also achieved solid progress thanks to the commitment and hard work of its staff. We have researched and identified a more reliable internet provider which the school will switch to in February, when our current internet subscription expires. Over the Christmas holidays the Computer Business Centre will also offer beginners computer courses. In order to promote this and the Computer Business as such, over the next weeks we will start an advertising campaign within the neighbouring community.

The final new arrival has been eagerly awaited by everyone here at St. Denis! A generator, sponsored by Into Your Hands has been installed and will supply the school and its businesses with electricity when needed. Due to the rainy season, power cuts have increased over the past weeks, and the generator will now enable us not only to ensure the work in the Computer Business Centre, but also supply the border students with light for study purposes in the evening.

As the rainy season has now finally set in, our Matooke has also resumed growing and we are expecting output from the plantation to increase again over the next months.

In all three businesses there are now detailed records being kept, which for the first time will enable us to produce a financial report at the end of this month. Regular financial reports will be vital for monitoring the progress of the St. Denis Self Sufficiency Project, and as we are all curious to find out about how we are doing, everyone here is looking forward to the report and its results.

Goodbye and Welcome!

2009-11-15T13:46:00.000-08:00

It is about one month since I arrived here in Makondo to take over as new project officer from Gemma. Saying good bye to Gemma was a sad occasion for everyone here in the village as she has done a brilliant job and will be dearly missed. However, everyone was really friendly and welcomed me to the community with open arms.

After two weeks of working hand in hand with Gemma, I am now on my own and continuing the work of helping to make St. Denis a self sufficient school. As we are waiting for the approval of funding to implement further income generating projects, I am focusing on making sure everyone here at St. Denis is prepared for the new businesses. We are now running weekly Excel courses for staff who will be involved in running the businesses with a focus on record keeping. The group has grown from 3 to 6 and we have extended the length of the class to two hours per week. My keen students are progressing very quickly and have even agreed to do a little exam next week.

Another focus right now is to improve the current businesses. Unfortunately Makondo parish has been hit by a drought and a very late arriving rainy season means the Matoke plantation and the dairy business have not been productive. The main goal for the dairy business will be to find ways to cost-efficiently counteract the malnutrition of the cows to increase output. Purchasing cow feed from the profits made or acquiring more land to plant nutritious elephant grass could be possible solutions which will be investigated. There have also been discussions about the possibility of extending the Matoke plantation to cope with the large demand for banana in the school kitchen. As for the internet and copy business - our current internet provider seems to be a bit like the electricity supply in Uganda – very temperamental. Therefore we are investigating alternatives to improve the internet service.

Furthermore there was also a revival of the agriculture club, but, in a slightly different format. To get students excited about the planned introduction of a new course called ‘Creating a Profitable Business’ next term, there is now a fortnightly ‘guest speaker series’. Guest speakers, owners of successful start up businesses, will share their experience with the students, to give them an insight but also inspiration about running a business. The first guest speaker last Wednesday was Father Edward, who, next to running a school also has a cattle and eucalyptus tree business. Father Edward’s talk, which was truly inspirational, has definitely worked up the student’ appetite, who are looking forward to our next guest speaker in 2 weeks time.

Alternating with the guest speakers, every Wednesday the agriculture club will take place with its focus on involving the students in the agricultural businesses at St. Denis. Next week, after planning and discussing future activities of the club, there will be a ‘treasure hunt’. Students need to solve a total of 10 tricky tasks such as estimating the number of Matoke plants in the school’s plantation or calculating the amount of cows needed to give every student at St. Denis with a cup of milk per day. The best 3 groups will be awarded with an exciting prize!

Parties, cows and a new intern...

2009-10-07T23:30:00.000-07:00

It’s been a busy few weeks at St Denis over the last few weeks as I prepare to leave and handover to new intern Christina.

Students returned to school a few weeks ago after a month holiday, and they are now studying hard in preparation for their final exams at the end of the month.
Some good progress on the projects has been made over the last couple of months with various activities taking place.

Just before the holidays though was Senior 4s leaving party, which is THE event of the school year! They in fact don’t leave until October, but this is the last chance they get to let their hair down before they get their heads down revising for their O-Level exams.

The students were up early preparing the food and getting the library ready to host the main event later on. All Senior 4 girls had been hidden away for most of the afternoon as they got themselves ready in traditional Ugandan dress called Gomas.

It was a quick change for the boys after supervising the arrival of the sound system. Parents, teachers and younger students gathered in front of the school to await the arrival of the S4 girls. A mass was then held by Father Kasoma, who is very popular among the students, with all his stories from the far off places he has travelled. Following mass came the obligatory speeches, another perfect opportunity to speak about the TAMTF projects. Food was served and the party really kicked off when the volume button on the sound system was cranked up to the max for the students and teachers to dance and sing the night away! The party was a great success and continued well into the wee hours.. I have to say it was nothing like any school disco I’ve ever been to!

So, back to the projects….

One of the cows in the dairy had a calf over the holidays. So milk production is back in flow with whatever is left over after feeding being sold to the local primary school. A few weeks before the birth a meeting with the Agriculture club was called when the agriculture teacher talked all about the cycle of the milk production and how to get the best production possible. So putting this knowledge into practice will be important as the students prepare to take a more hands on approach to the dairy project and start learning how to milk the cows for themselves.

Excel training for some of the teachers and the school secretary has been going well in preparation for the record keeping and accounts of the new businesses. The wonders of excel have captured these staff and they are eager to continue their training!

More work has been taking place with the development of activities for teaching entrepreneurship to the students. We have been developing activities with as much focus on the projects as possible so students have a real life example with which to carry out the activities and be able to see the true purpose of learning about entrepreneurship.

Into Your Hands opened a new office here in Makondo in August with two new staff, James and Justine. They will be managing the IYH projects like Send a Piglet Home (SAPH) and will also be involved in the TAMTF projects. In fact James has been an invaluable source of knowledge when it came to preparing the budgets for the school piggery and dairy. There is not much he doesn’t know about rearing pigs and cows, and his advice and experience will prove to be vital when these projects get going.

The SAPH project is going well with some of the students pigs having given birth to new piglets. The team are now ready to select the new beneficiaries of the project who will each receive a piglet. Training is being organised for the students and their families to learn the important points of rearing piglets then it will be over to them. The team has been working hard to get feedback from the beneficiaries who all said this project has been a great help to them and their families.

Christina arrived last week to take over from me and is settling in to St Denis life. She has lots of exciting things planned for staff and students over the next few months as they prepare to take on the projects.

It’s been a great 6 months for me here and I have got to work with and get to know some wonderful people. Staff and students are really enthusiastic about the TAMTF projects and are working hard to make sure they will be a great success.

Piglets are on their way!

2009-07-12T23:25:00.000-07:00

The big news from this week is that three of the pigs in the Send a Piglet Home Project are now pregnant! This means that in four months time they will give birth and be able to pass on a piglet to another student for the project to begin again. Preparations will now be started for selecting the new beneficiaries and getting them ready to receive a new addition to their family. The students will prepare a presentation for the new beneficiaries so they can share with them their new found pig rearing skills and experiences.

I met up with two students this week, Susan and Michael, who have agreed to talk to me to tell me a bit about themselves and their lives here in Makondo. We want to discover what makes them who they are – family, friends, hopes, dreams and fears and how they see their future here in Uganda, or indeed beyond. It is hoped that we will be able to meet again in a few years time to find out what they are doing and what impact attending a TAMTF school has had on their lives. I will go to visit and chat to them and their families at the weekend with one of their teachers, John.

We were also joined by some visitors from America, who were welcomed with yet another superb performance from the students. The visitors are from a charity called United Children’s Fund who first visited St Denis years ago. They will be visiting the school and community for the next few weeks.

The American charity, Into Your Hands, who TAMTF is partnering with on this project, has recently set up a branch here in Makondo. IYH America already provides massive support for the school and sponsors several students. The branch in Uganda will consist of 3 staff who will work with the staff at St Denis in managing and monitoring the projects. I have been getting ready to meet the new staff and introduce them to the TAMTF model and to tell them about the school projects.

Back to School

2009-06-28T22:48:00.000-07:00

With a mixture of excitement and that back-to-school feeling, the students trickled in through the school gates to start another term after their month of holiday. I say holiday, but in fact most students spent their time working in their family’s fields or helping to look after their younger siblings… So maybe coming back to school felt more like a holiday to them.

So getting back to business, we started off the week with the first agriculture club. Membership seemed to have somehow grown considerably, so we now have three groups a week. First off was Senior 2. The students were rounded up under the shade of a tree and briefed about the agricultural mission of the day – digging and weeding. First stop the tool shed to collect various tools and then on to the matoke plantation. A lot of work has been done over the holidays, with the help of some of the sponsored students. There are now trenches in between the rows of trees to stop the water running away. There has also been much ‘mulching’, again to conserve water as we head into the dry season. Students were split up into groups with some digging more trenches and others weeding. At the end, activity records were completed ready for the next group to continue where they had finished.

Another job for the sponsored students in the holidays was to plant a load of sweet potatoes. This is great news for the pigs as they get to eat the leaves from the little piles of potatoes. It is also great news for staff and students as they get to add sweet potatoes to their school lunches.

Speaking of pigs… there has been a lot of swine fever in the local area lately, unfortunately killing large numbers. Luckily none of the student’s pigs in the Send a Piglet Home project have been affected, but it has meant that they have had to delay the process of them having piglets, so they don’t catch swine fever. We discovered that this has not stopped the cows in the dairy though, two of which are now pregnant.

More sessions with the teachers have taken place looking at how the projects can be integrated into their lessons. Teachers prepared their own lesson plans using one of the projects and then tried it out on the other staff, who played the role of students brilliantly! Some great ideas for lessons came out of this and they will hopefully be a fun and interesting addition to the student’s lessons in the future.

It was celebration central last week as the school held a special day for staff, students, parents and the local community, to celebrate the feast day of Saint Denis. The day started with a meeting for all the teachers and parents, followed by mass, then on to the speeches. This was the perfect opportunity for me to introduce the local community to the Teach a Man to Fish mission and what we are trying to achieve. A massive lunch was prepared for everyone, which was then followed by some brilliant performances from the students.

First weeks at St Denis....

2009-05-30T06:15:00.000-07:00

So, after explaining to a few people that I was in fact NOT here to teach the students how to fish, I set about my actual mission.

The school will have seven businesses over the next three years, two of which will be the banana plantation and the dairy which are already at the school.

I spent the first couple of weeks getting to know the teachers and talking to the students. The Students are really excited about getting stuck in to the practical parts of the projects and after I had spoken to them all in assembly, individuals were coming up to me with ideas for their own projects like growing passion fruit.

To put all that creative thinking to good use we decided to set up an Agriculture club so the students could get involved straight away with working on the banana plantation and dairy. As everyone knows, every good club needs a president, vice president, secretary etc etc.. don’t they? So the students took it upon themselves to present campaigns for their right to be the leading members of the club, evoking a very enthusiastic response from the other students, with approval being signalled by loud cries and drumming on the desks! In what was seemingly chaos, we eventually ended up with our club leaders in what was definitely a democratic vote! The club will start after the student’s exams.

We have held some sessions with all the teachers to introduce them to becoming a Self-Sufficient School and how they can be involved. An important part of this will be for the teachers to use the projects in their lessons.

One of the projects at St Denis will be the banana plantation, known locally as matoke, and served as a staple part of a Ugandan diet. At the moment there are about 300 plants which will start producing good amounts of matoke by the end of the year. This will be sold to the school canteen and used for school dinners for staff and students.
I received the grand tour of the plantation from Ssentungu, who currently takes care of it, with him explaining the finer points of all things matoke. The students too will discover all this and more as they learn how to make growing matoke into a successful business.

Another project already established at St Denis is the Send a Piglet Home Project, led by the business teacher Godfrey. Thirty of the poorest students were each given a piglet to take home and look after. After 8 months or so the now grown up piglet will be able to have up to 10 piglets of her own, one of which will be given back to the school and the rest being kept or sold by the student.

Godfrey took me to see some of the piglets at the student’s homes, where they live in purpose built shelters with all the mod cons like concrete floors and water troughs. It was great to see how the piglets are cared for by the students with real enthusiasm. Some of the piglets are now nearly ready to have the first piglets of the project, so watch this space!

Welcome to St Denis...

2009-05-30T06:04:00.000-07:00

If you travel an hour out of Masaka in South East Uganda, along a dusty road lined with banana plantations, you will find St Denis Senior Secondary School.

Situated in Makondo, a rural area of Uganda, St Denis is a school of 250 students and a team of 15 teachers. The majority of families in this area are subsistence farmers living on a very low income.

Taking advantage of all the natural resources they have around them, St Denis is working hard to become the first Self-Sufficient School in Uganda. Being one step ahead of the game, the school already has a banana plantation and 4 cows, which will be the start of the dairy. In developing both these projects, along with 5 others over the next 3 years, St Denis will have the opportunity to become financially Self-Sufficient.

At the moment, the school is supported by American charity Into Your Hands, which provides school fees for some of the poorest students, many of whom are orphans. TAMTF have partnered with IYH to work towards creating a school which no longer has to rely on outside funding, but can generate enough income to cover all their operational costs.

In becoming a Self-Sufficient School, the students will have the opportunity to be involved in all the practical aspects of running the businesses and equip themselves with all important entrepreneurial and agriculture skills to take with them through school and beyond, passing on their expertise along the way.

In class teachers will be able to take advantage of using the businesses for practical activities and examples in the teaching of their subjects.
These teachers mean business! In one of the first meetings I had with them they told me they wanted to be the kind of teachers who can change the future of the children of Uganda. So look out Uganda, St Denis is coming!