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The nature of International Development often means that you do not see any change during your time in-country.
Restless Development teaches Gender Equality, Civic Participation, Sexual Rights & Health and Agro-Livelihoods, with the aims to reduce poverty, promote equality, engage youths in decision making and decreasing Teenage Pregnancy & the spread of HIV/AIDS.
At times it has been disheartening, because the programme intends to create a lasting change of attitudes and behaviour, and we have not seen any change during our time.
Today we received some incomplete statistics about Restless Development ICS C6:
We reached 7,134 in-school youths (INSY), 921 Out-of-School youth (OOSY) and 128 Community Adults (CA) with life-changing Sexual Rights and Health education.
We taught important life skills, such as communication, self esteem and gender equality to 2350 INSY, 254 OOSY and 36 CA.
We delivered an inspiring civic participation programme to 387 INSY, 392 OOSY and 41 CA, encouraging them to engage in local and government level decisions to shape their own futures.
712 INSY, 278 OOSY and 27 CA were taught how to build sack gardens and the importance of using organic pesticides and fungicides for sustainable agriculture.
Overall, we taught 438 individual sessions and reached over 12,000 people. This doesn't even include the 60 events held across 2 districts.
This cycle has hit above and beyond the INSY target of reaching 2,000 people. We broke a record by reaching 1453 OOSY, nearly 7 times the target of 210.
We may not see the results of our work here immediately, but I leave Uganda tonight incredibly proud of our teams for their amazing work. This is the 6th cycle of work here. Restless also works in 6 other countries, alongside the other 8 charities under ICS doing similar work. We are making a difference: as a Ugandan would say - slowly but slowly.
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Mzungu Memories
Non-FictionIn 2016 I had the pleasure of spending three months in rural Uganda teaching sex education, gender equality, basic sanitation and agro-livelihoods to some of the most amazing people in the World. Living and working with the same people was just the...
