Evidence-based writing on girls' education, women's empowerment and life in our community, from the team in Jinja, Uganda.
Four articles on this site end by promising a verified referral directory. Here is what we are building, the eight checks every entry has to pass, why we will not publish the quick version, and how organisations in Jinja can join.
Five sentences do most of the work, and what you do not say matters more than what you do. The phrases that help, the kindly ones that cause harm, and a pocket card to carry.
Nobody has told you anything, and that is what makes it difficult. What you do with a suspicion is riskier than what you do with a disclosure. The six forms abuse takes, what you might notice, and the helpful moves that make things worse.
Sooner or later, someone tells you. What happens in the next five minutes decides whether she ever tells anyone again. The five sentences to say, the seven things not to do, what Ugandan law offers, and why we never publish survivor stories.
A reusable pad is not a product. It is a product plus a set of conditions, and if the conditions are missing you have handed a girl something worse than what she had. What the evidence shows, what makes a good pad, and the six conditions.
A school receives a delivery of pads, photographs are taken, and on Thursday a girl still goes home at eleven. A ten-point check drawn from Uganda's own national guidance, and an honest look at what the evidence does and does not show.
Between a number written on the corner of an exercise book and a health worker who actually examines her, nine separate things have to go right. What adolescent-friendly care really means, and why we record whether she arrived.
Speeches are made, photographs are taken, and nothing in any household changes. What allyship looks like when it is real, and the four ways “male involvement” makes a girl’s situation worse.
It is a real figure from a credible source, and it is almost always shared without one. Where it comes from, the three things it is not, and the four investments that change the outcome behind it.
The law is clearer than most people think, and that clarity helps nobody who has not heard it. What it says, the four things people get wrong, and what to do if you suspect a child is about to be married.
Three figures get quoted as though they describe the same girls. They do not. What Uganda's numbers actually measure, what the law requires, why it keeps happening, and what a serious response in Busoga looks like.
What a vocational class actually involves: the blackboard, the exercise books, the quality standard, and why a $150 treadle machine decides whether six months of training was worth anything.
Around one in four Ugandan girls aged 15 to 19 has begun childbearing. What gets said about them in the classroom and the church decides what happens next, and most of it is wrong.
Uganda allows girls to return to school after childbirth. Only about one in three actually does. The barriers in between, and a pathway back that survives contact with reality.
What does sponsorship actually buy, who decides, and how would you know it worked? A transparent service model, and why we will never send you a photograph of the girl.
Most people assume pregnancy is why girls leave school. The evidence says cost is, by a distance. Here are the five barriers that actually compound, and what answers each one.
Busoga carries a disproportionate share of Uganda's teenage pregnancy burden, but the district-level variation is the part that matters, and it is what national averages hide.
Who we are, why the centre exists, how our five-stage pathway works, what we can honestly do today, and how you can stand with girls in Jinja.
