The Last Kilometer is proud to be the fiscal sponsor for My Home Stars, a US organization that inspires and educates children in Uganda by providing innovate, fun, and engaging educational tools for children and educators.
At the age of six years old, children across Uganda become eligible to start attending school. To many children and parents, this is a very exciting time, but unfortunately, children from hard to reach areas such as refugee camps and rural communities struggle with their studies due to limited access to learning resources. The educational gap is even bigger within rural communities and refugee camps where there is a big shortage of teachers and learning resources as a result of the daily increasing numbers of refugee children.
My Home Stars was founded out of necessity as a result of Joel Baraka’s lived experiences.
Like thousands of other refugee children, Joel who grew up in Kyangwali Refugee Camp in Western Uganda, faced a hard time accessing quality learning resources while attending school in the camp. With a textbook to student ratio of 1:8, Baraka mostly relied on teachers as the main if not only source of learning.
Today Uganda is Africa’s largest refugee-hosting nation, with more than 1.4 million refugees. Nearly 800,000 of these refugees below the age of 18, however, according to SIT Digital Collection research, only 41% were attending school in 2017. This leaves 59% (472,000) of refugee children out of school. Further, according to the Ugandan Ministry of Education, only 11% of these students were able to enroll for secondary education in 2018. While the effects of civil war on the lives of refugees cannot be ignored, lack of sufficient resources and quality education delivery systems in refugee camps remain two root causes for the problems school-going refugees face.
"Our goal is to develop more accessible, fun, and engaging educational resources for both teachers and students that will transform schools and other learning institutions into spaces learners look forward to spending most of their time"
More information is available at My Home Stars' website, and you can learn more about My Home Stars on their Youtube channel.
You can support their important work by making a tax-deductible donation to My Home Stars through PayPal.