Our staff is collaborating with our partners in Uganda, enjuba and Firm Foundation Education Trust (FFET), to bring you updates on the libraries and communities we serve and how they have been affected by the novel coronavirus.
Updates on our work in Uganda: Our 2020 container deadline is currently pending. To stay updated on our active container deadlines, subscribe to our newsletter. If you have questions about the status of 2019’s Uganda container, contact your container manager for the latest news.
Our African Partner in Uganda, Aaron Kirunda, speaks on how COVID-19 has changed the way he works.
COVID-19 has greatly affected how we work as most of our work deals directly with schools, and they were the first to be closed, sending us to work at home and to re-think our work. Because of this, it also wiped out over $90,000 in expected revenue in the two months of lockdown as everything changed, including sponsorship commitments, and revenue from programs. It has also required that our team gets to adapt to this new normal and get to normalize working at home and being able to continue to support teachers and parents at the same time.
How has COVID-19 affected how you communicate with school facilities and school libraries, and/or how are you continuing your work on the ground during this time?
We used to work directly with schools, visiting them and conducting face to face meetings, training, and all sorts of things. Since the lockdown due to COVID-19, we have had to reduce on this work and switch to communicating with teachers and parents and their children through telephone, and through social media like WhatsApp, Facebook and Twitter.
What are ways we can encourage children to read even when schools are closed?
We have been engaging with parents through social media to encourage reading. We actually conducted a reading competition for children and awarded them with books. How this worked is that we asked parents to record their children reading for about 2 minutes and share the video and then we graded based on proficiency and other factors. However, to encourage all children who participated, we gave out books to all, and this increased the children’s interest in wanting to read more and be part of what we are doing.
List of COVID-19 Resources – Uganda
- State House Uganda
- Ministry of Health, Republic of Uganda
- Uganda International Travel Information, Travel.State.Gov