Uganda, Kampala: Refugee Children Online Education for their protection and bridge for continuity in their education both formal and informal

Uganda currently hosts more than 1,200,000 refugees from different countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia, Rwanda, Burundi among others. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) more than 75% of the entire refugee population in Uganda is composed of women and children. Generally refugees in Uganda are hosted in camps called here (settlements) however other refugees also live in urban areas on their own without humanitarian assistance. Currently Kampala is the main area to host refugees and the current estimation indicate that there are more than 100,000 refugees in Kampala who are living alone without any humanitarian assistance and that is why we also have refugee children not accessing education.
Access to education

While education is one among the best options to ensure the protection of refugee children, many of these children have faced many challenges in order to access education. There are issues of language barrier for those who came where English is not spoken, there are issues of curriculum, there are issues of academic document equation, there is issues of few classes, few teachers, lack of school fees, uniform, distance and so many. Before the Universal Primary Education which is the government programme was viewed as free but in actual sense it is a shared responsibility between the government and the parents and yet many refugees have no source of income in order to raise money for the education of their children. This has affected so many refugee children especially those from less privileged families or those who do not have a family anymore.
For many refugee children in Uganda, to access education is more of chance and more like a miracle. In order to respond to these challenges and so many others, refugees themselves have organized together into NGOs, CBOs, religious organizations, groups, cultural groups in order to offer all kinds of informal education to refugees both children and adults. One among these programs is English language to both refugee children and their parents so that they can cope up with communication challenges here in Uganda which key and paramount for their local integration.
Our organization Foundation People for Peace and Defense of Human Rights and our church Mizeetuni Ministries have contributed to this noble cause through strong partnership with two other refugee led organizations who are our implementing partners for refugee children education mainly Foundation People for Peace and Defense of Human Rights and Intervention for Human in Danger.
These two organizations offer language classes to refugee children while Mizeetuni as a church do support them in different ways. Children do come for English lessons three times per week and they have 2 hours per day for a period of 6 months. After that period those who are lucky can continue with their education in formal education and those who are not stay at home.
We have two centers located in Kisenye Central Division Kampala with a total number of 33 children and another center located in Kibuye Makindye division with a total number of 24 children as per now.
Challenges

Over the years we are facing number of challenge in this programme as following:

It exist on human resource from volunteers and in most cases these volunteers are fellow refugees from the communities who are also affected by so many problems of life and therefore lacks consistency, quality and innovation,
For this programme to exist, someone must be willing to pay for the room where the children will study from and that is a big challenge especially in case where the funds are not available, it becomes heavy to the hosting organizations to raise funds to pay their offices and also for the classrooms.

The question of the children who graduate from this programme and who have no possibility to continue with their education, the question we always face with is “what next for these children who have no money to enroll for formal education”.
Limited space to accommodate a big number of refugee children, many children keep on coming for this programme but we don’t have enough space for them,
Lack of motivation to teachers in term of allowances, scholastic materials and other equipment such as all sorts of office furniture,
The online refugee education

We believe that the innovative idea of online learning is one among the attempts to address some of these challenges affecting refugee children in Uganda. This is an alternative to education, a copying mechanisms and means to create hope for the future of these children and a mechanism to simply participating in their protection. We need 18 computers for the programme to start this programme.

It is evident to clarify that we did not have this specific online programme and now this will add value on what we have in place as described above, this is being considered as a pilote project and will be evaluated in the next two years. We need 18 computers at the start among which 5 will be used in the children center in Kisenyi, 5 five in the children center in Kibuye and five in the children center in Nakivale refugee settlement. Then 1 computer for the teachers in each center two in Kampala and one in Nakivale settlement.
We plan that each center will be able to accommodate at the beginning at least 25 children who will be able to access lessons three hours per day and for three days per week, however this can change when the project gets its own classrooms. This because the classrooms will also be used for other activities and then will shall change when the programme shall have its own permanent spaces.
During the enrollment we shall put particular attention on gender sensitivity and shall encourage more the girl-child but also consider different nationalities and religious background.
The proramme will enroll refugees from 10 to 18 years who have proven capacity to interact in English both boys and girls and therefore this programme will work hand in hand with English lessons to these refugee children.