School Priorities - SNV

Community Participation
Junior Achievement teaches children about their community so that they understand how their studies relate to daily life.
Classes took field trips to learn about what jobs people perform in the community.
• Visiting community decision-making
bodies to learn about public discourse
and gain a sense of civic duty.
• Looking into the role of government
and how government plans can be
supported, helping them realise their
role in maintaining a functioning
democratic government.
• Studying why people pay taxes and how
the government uses that money.
SNV, through the Alternative Teaching and
Learning Approaches (ATLAS) programme,
brought the JA programme to ten primary
schools in Mpigi district based primarily
on the willingness of their management to
think outside the box (this strategy yielded
good results later). Mpigi district is located
in the central region of Uganda, where
children under the age of 15 make up half
of the population. They graduate en masse
from school into an unbalanced economy,
where they must compete for jobs in order
to earn money to provide for themselves
and their families.
Although JA is an international programme
that has been implemented in schools across
the globe, SNV understood that it had to be
tweaked in order to become locally relevant.
In early 2009, SNV worked with JA Uganda
staff to customise the Junior Achievement
manuals and handouts for rural and
peri-urban Ugandan schools in time to
conduct a training of trainers involving a
headteacher and teacher from each school,
who would run the programme in their
schools. The endeavour began in earnest
in September 2009, with seven of the ten
schools delivering the first session of the JA
programme.
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