St Kizito Kijjaguzo Primary School
Uganda

In July 2009, Link Community Development (LCD) partnered our school with St Kizito Kijjaguzo Primary school, Uganda. This is a long term partnership through which children, staff and stake holders learn about life in their partner schools. Children write to each other, send photos and pictures and undertake joint projects to discover similarities and differences in their lives, lived in very different parts of the world. We intend that some teachers will take part in reciprocal visits to St Kizito.  In addition, we hope that we may be able to raise money to help children in our partner school benefit from some of the commodities that we take for granted on a daily basis.

View St. Kizito Kijjaguzo Primary School in a larger map 

The children
St. Kizito Kijjaguzo primary school has an enrolment of 802 pupils with 390 boys and 412 girls. The school caters also for children with special needs. The special needs category is mostly; children with physical disabilities, blind children and children with learning difficulties. The introduction of cluster centres for special needs education, Kijjaguzo primary school being one of the two chosen centres in the district has so far registered 22 pupils. Registration and community sensitisation for parents to bring their children with disabilities to school is still in progress.

Being in a mixed school, these children with disabilities face a lot of challenges because they can not do things the way the others do and more so, they share the same classes. The Teachers find it hard to separate them since there are not enough classes and special trained teachers to handle special needs. On the other hand, the introduction of these children has made the other children grow to be responsible people as it is seen from the care and the attention they give to the disabled around the school. ‘’ They have given a loving atmosphere to these children’’ commented one of the teachers. 

School Background to St. Kizito Kijjaguzo Primary School

St. Kizito Kijjaguzo Primary School is located in Semuto Sub County, at Kijjaguzo Catholic Parish in Nakaseke District in the central part of Uganda. The school was founded by the white father’s missionaries of Africa in 1937. The missionaries had a goal of teaching religion, Reading and Writing and in order to fulfill this goal, they started small classes to teach religion and there fore it began as a catechism school. By 1951 the school had reached a status of P3 sub grade with a population of 59 pupils. The school was mainly teaching reading, writing and arithmetic and it was only for boys. In mid 1950s, the white fathers appointed Mr. Lubega Andrew as a head teacher and when it attained the level of full primary, it became government aided.

This school was greatly destroyed by the guerilla war of 1980-86. People were forced to flee their homes and the school had to close until 1994. Realizing the need of special needs education, Nakaseke as a district decided to establish two cluster centers and which St. Kijjaguzo primary school is one of them. The school provides both a special needs and a regular school.

Fact and figures

Facilities

The Head Teacher
Rev. Sister Prisca Nalule is the head teacher at Kijjaguzo primary school.

“ I like developments and where ever I have been posted, I try by all means to see to it that I make some developments more especially in the areas of school structures’’ says Prisca. She loves active children and co-curricular activities are taken seriously. She however, sympathizes with the special needs children who have no facilities for sport activities. She can only hope that they live a better life through education. Apart from her strong area in caring for little children, Prisca loves computers and more especially the internet although these facilities are no where near the school.

Teachers

Kijjaguzo Primary School is blessed with very focused and committed teachers. The teachers are very friendly and you can feel the warm atmosphere around the school immediately you enter the school.

Most of them feel that as teachers, they have great responsibility in making a difference in these children’s lives and will do what they can to make them better citizens in future. When asked about their biggest challenges, almost all the teachers agreed that engaging the younger pupils in education was very difficult as well as working with the children that require special education due to physical or mental disabilities owing to inadequate skills amongst teachers. Mr. Owoi Dananto is the deputy head teacher, Nassali Jane the senior woman and Male Ronald senior man. Kazibwe Fred and Jerubabel Robert are in charge of games.

School Needs and Future Developments

• Construction of a borehole or a water source
• Build more classrooms
• Special needs instructional materials
• Training of some teachers in special needs management
• Inadequate furniture
• Inadequate teachers accommodation
• A school van

The School Community

Being deeply rooted in the rural areas of central Uganda, KIjjaguzo is one of the last communities to recover from the effects of the guerilla war that brought the current government into power. Its one of the poorest communities because every thing was once burnt down and people had migrated to other places, it has taken people along time to resettle and apart from economic struggles, the community has been badly affected by the HIV/AIDS pandemic as these can be seen by the number of orphans and vulnerable children at school.

The age group of parents in this community range from 18- to 45 years. And they depend on subsistence farming as their source of livelihood. With mobilized support, they have been very active in school activities such as meetings and sports days. However, like any other rural community in Uganda, getting parents to offer their children full support in their education still remains a great challenge.

Universal Primary Education

In 1997, the government of Uganda began a new policy of Universal primary Education (UPE) offering free primary education to four children per family. UPE later expanded to all primary school pupils. The response has been impressive since 1997. Today, primary school enrolment has almost tripled moving up from 2.8 million to 7.5 millions. This surge of new pupils poses great challenges for Ugandan schools. One of the biggest challenges is trying to keep up with the large influx of pupils. Teacher-pupil ratios are high, resources are scarce, and funding is being stretched to the maximum.

Link Community Development

Working in partnership with schools, local communities and government, Link Community Development works to achieve sustainable improvement of Ugandan schools. Through education and training, Link is helping disadvantaged people in Africa to achieve their potential.

All information on this page is taken from the school profile compiled by Anita Muruve of Link Community Development

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