2023 has been a good year for UHST and for the Humanist Schools in Uganda. Teachers and children have enjoyed being back at school and there are high expectations of good examination results in January.

It was an important year for the wider Humanist Schools Movement in Uganda. Bringing the schools together for the 3^rd Humanist Schools Conference was a truly uplifting event for everyone. The creation of the Organisation of Humanist Schools of Uganda and getting it officially recognised under Uganda law also marks a huge step forward.

As a charity we are pleased to be able to bring the Kasese Humanist Schools into our support network alongside Isaac Newton, Mustard Seed, Katumba and Kanungu schools.

Our 2023 UHST Annual Progress Report gives a full account where we stand as a charity at the end of 2023. 

We should like to thank our loyal supporters for the long-term commitment they have shown to the pioneering work of the Humanist Schools in Uganda, in the face of considerable challenges. Without your ongoing support the remarkable developments outlined in the 2023 Report would have been almost impossible. 

The schools’ two greatest challenges are to ensure that their teachers are paid regularly and to be able to keep in school those bright, needy children who struggle to pay fees. We could make life easier for the schools if we could attract more regular monthly donations. Links to make credit card donations through PayPal and to UK bank standing order forms can be found on our donation page.

Robert Magara’s 2023 Report as Kanungu Humanist Primary School Director demonstrates the need for each new Humanist school to gain acceptance from its local community. Robert motivation for setting up his school was to help his community overcome the wounds created when a 10 Commandments Evangelical Preacher poisoned 800 Katumba families who had joined his congregation, locked them in his church and burned them to death. Despite this atrocity, the community remains strongly religious, and the school has faced opposition from local Evangelical Christian Churches. The main Katumba church urged its congregation to boycott the new Humanist school, which had no religious affiliation. Instead Kanungu welcomes children from all faith backgrounds and educates them in a secular environment with no discrimination and where children are valued equally as human beings.

Although recruitment to the school was slow in its first year, it is gradually winning support from local families. We have seen in other schools, that Humanist schools school win over their local communities through their actions. They work hard to achieve high standards of child welfare and demonstrate high standards of education through their performance in national examinations, in which the Humanist schools are beginning to excel.

Uganda Humanist Schools Trust has helped Robert by providing funds to build decent classrooms, provide access to power, water and toilets, and ensure there are adequate books and learning materials. We have helped him to pay his teachers and provide food and firewood for cooking by sending regular monthly support payments. Robert has also attracted support from other well-wishers though the school’s Facebook page, managed by Terri Julians.

Robert’s Report shows how recruitment has grown substantially. The school is become a vibrant learning community and already coming out top in local, regional and national football championships. It has a promising future.

Link to full 2023 Kanungu School Director’s Report..

Paying teachers’ salaries and other staff costs is the main cost of running the Humanist schools in Uganda. And yet, the fees paid by local parents are generally insufficient to provide decent levels of remuneration for teachers, some of whom, in the more remote primary schools, earn little more than $2 a day. Scholarship payments made by UHST supporters make a substantial contribution towards staffing costs for the Humanist secondary schools. Families and local communities understand that we cannot help all children but are happy that they are awarded to talented students who gain a Grade 1 in their Primary Leaving Certificate and deserve financial help because they are double orphans, have a struggling single parent or other significant challenge.

However, scholarships do not work well in Humanist Primary Schools. These schools tend to be in areas of uniform poverty, where all families struggle as subsistence farmers. Furthermore, there are no criteria for grading young children on the basis of ability. Schools that give help with school fees have to find other ways to justify this. In the early days of Katumba Parents Humanist Primary School this was relatively easy. The children that were helped were those whose fathers had been killed in the 2016 insurrection. The whole community was happy for those children to be helped. However, where there is no such clear criterion for the allocation of a scholarship, other parents tend to feel a sense of unfairness when some children are, apparently arbitrarily, awarded scholarships, while a majority of children are denied them. In these circumstances scholarships can be counter-productive as they lead to a growth in fee arrears by the parents of non-scholarship children.

Our new Teacher & Child Appeal is designed to avoid these problems by funding the costs of teachers directly. If there is a good response to the appeal, we will be able to make a big contribution to the staffing bill. This will enable schools to keep down school fees, which will benefit all families and children, rather than a select few who might have received scholarships. Regular monthly donations from the Teacher-Child Appeal will be used partly to improve pay and conditions for hard-working teachers and partly to provide confidential and discretionary help to those striving children who are struggling to pay school fees.