Lifeskills and Mentorship

One of the needs we identified in our research before starting the project was lack of access to education and educational resources for many marginalized teenagers. They come from humble backgrounds where parents juggle between feeding the kids or buying books for them. We started having life skills and mentorship classes at Kireme Primary school in Bomani from July 2020 during the long Covid-19 induced holidays. We agreed with the school administration to have lessons every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at the school. Afterwards when schools opened we continued with our pilot program in some schools and currently we have holiday sessions whenever schools close. At our day care/safe house in Bomani village of Kikambala we have lessons for teen mums not in school, young mums and their siblings. Teen mums from poor backgrounds are not taken back to school so we are helpingto fill that gap even as we take some of them back to school. We teach various topics such as; self-identity, self-esteem, setting up goals and priorities, career choices, sexual reproductive health, peer pressure, drugs and substance abuse, basic computer skills and many more topics. We also invite people from various professionals to coach and mentor the boys and girls after we learned that most of the marginalized boys and girls lack good role models. Their literacy and numeracy levels are also low and we have tried to source some revision materials that can help them improve their skills. they come and get the materilas from our day care/safe house. We have two desktop computers at the moment though one is not working. Boys and girls get to ride bikes after the lessons that we have to help with their mental health and fitness.