Hope Integrated Academy

www.hopeacademyuganda.org

The Academy’s mission is to provide a well-rounded (quality) formal and practical education that will empower the mind, body, and spirit of Uganda’s disadvantaged orphans.  Most of these innocent children have no one to turn to.  The huge number of orphans and the corresponding deaths of the parental generation have overwhelmed the country.  There are many children with no relatives who can feed any more mouths even one meal a day, let alone provide school fees to give them a path to a self-supporting future as adults.  Abandoned children die, become street children in the cities and towns, or may be exploited in various ways as the price of daily survival.   These children urgently need our help.  Hope Academy is an initiative to provide for the educational needs of these children in a boarding school environment that also feeds, clothes, loves and guides them.   We will break the cycle of poverty for the orphan children living there.

Expected enrollment is 500 students when the Academy is fully operational.   About 300 will be AIDS orphans living on campus, and the other 200 will be residents of the surrounding community who are day students.  When fully developed, the Academy will be comprised of a kindergarten, elementary school (grades 1 – 7), vocational training school, a community library,  a computer training center, and a health clinic.   Most of the orphan resident students will be studying at the kindergarten and elementary level, and most students from the community will be enrolled in the vocational school.   We will open as a day school before the residences are built, and therefore will begin the vocational education first.

Uganda’s literacy rate lags at 69%, and majority of illiterates are concentrated in rural areas, the communities we serve.   To address the great need, the Academy will provide adult education programs in subjects such as literacy, Business English and basic math.   Vocational skills and computer training will be open to adults as well as youths from the local communities.   We are working to bring many resources to an impoverished and resource-poor rural region.