Corporate teams across the country are taking up the challenge…
What can be done to support young girls in Northern Uganda who are alone, pregnant and unable to continue their schooling?
Hosted by professional facilitators, the Te-Kworo Foundation Community Restorers Challenge includes interactive fast-paced simulation exercises and thought-provoking discussions that promote teamwork, increased empathy and more open minds. The results?
- Strengthened teams with greater appreciation of their colleagues.
- Heightened awareness about the amazing work Te-Kworo Foundation staff do to deliver on their vision that all girls have a right to a better future no matter what their circumstances.
- Increased social impact by supporting a charity that empowers young girls and women, through education, to gain skills and self-sufficiency to live healthier and happier lives, with a better future for them and their children.
Young girls in Northern Uganda don’t enjoy the same rights and freedom as their counterparts in Australia due to a patriarchal society of arranged marriages and culture of tolerating abuse. This is changing, but the problem was exacerbated with the brutal war in Northern Uganda in the late 1980s when an estimated 25,000+ children were abducted at gunpoint by the LRA (Lord’s Resistance Army).
The young boys were forced to become child soldiers and the girls faced sex slavery as ‘wives’ for the rebel commanders. After the war ended the country was left with the problem that these young girls now had babies and young children of their own and many were unable to return to their families, forcing them to live in destitute homes often without adult support and condemning them to a life of poverty, servitude and little hope. This problem still exists today when young girls find themselves pregnant and are forced to abandon their education and any hopes they had for their future.
This is what the Te-Kworo Foundation has been working hard to change since 2002 in partnership with local communities by helping rehabilitate these young girls and provide them with the support, education and training to give them trade skills and the ability to become self-sufficient:
- The charity runs an Academy that started in 2008 and now has two boarding schools in Northern Uganda for 500 young girls and provides on-site childcare support for their children.
- They have a Maternal and Child Health Clinic to ensure the safe delivery of babies and the ongoing health of the students and their children along with young women in the community.
- Their Community and Social Protection Services work with communities and local government to identify girls at risk, prevent illegal underage forced marriages, as well as educate the wider society on the issues and problems so that in time this cultural dynamic can be arrested and the rights, lives and future of young women across the country can be respected and celebrated.
They believe that educating a girl, is in fact, educating a nation.
