wannabeamazin

The Bajjo Project

In 2008 a small team from the UK established the initial wannabeamazin project in Bajjo; a small village in the Luwero District of Uganda. The project is based at a newly opened community primary school and is now being run by a local team headed by Vincent, the programme manager.

During the initial phase of the project we established a community resource centre, piloted the first wannabeamazin programmes and constructed a range of outdoor sports facilities. Read on to find out more...

wannabeamazin Programmes

We offer holiday programmes in sports, arts and creative studies for the youth of Bajjo, as well as a junior programme for the younger children (a mixture of arts, creative studies and sports). The children are encouraged to attend regularly to develop their particular area of interest. Click here to find out more about our programmes.

In addition we run an adult English class twice a week, football and netball training for all ages and host volleyball sessions on a Sunday. All our programmes are free of charge - a timetable of activities can be viewed here.

Bajjo Community Resource Centre

One of our main objectives in Bajjo was to set up a community resource centre that could serve both children and adults from the community. This centre would be a home for our recreational programmes, but also offer a place for people in the village to gather and socialise.

Through our community resource centre we have established an after-school and weekend library, where people can read, draw, play board games or finish their school work and a sports loan service where anyone in the community can hire a piece of sports equipment for a nominal fee.

Bajjo Community Village Party

We have also established a regular 'Village Party' where the whole community comes together to compete in sports tournaments (football and netball), sing and dance, as well as learn a simple but valuable health message from a visiting health expert. The initiative is proving very popular, attracting over 300 people at each event.

Construction of Community Facilities

The bulk of our construction work so far has been to develop sports pitches for the entire community. This has included a netball, football and volleyball pitch at the school site, and a further full-size football pitch within the community.

We also constructed a disabled-access playground on the school grounds, built a community notice board and painted the outside of the school with African animals and important health messages for the children.

Bajjo Community School

While the UK team were stationed in Uganda in 2008 they took a seat on the school council to offer assistance with the sustainability of the school. Through this position we bought and supplied the curriculum text books for the teachers to use and purchased a water-tank to collect safe drinking water for the children at the school.

These are our 'before' and 'after' pictures, but you can see all the work that went on in between by checking out our PROJECT PHOTOS here!

In addition to completing our main work, we also completed three more worthwhile projects during the trip:

The Bajjo Craft Makers

The Bajjo Craft Makers are a group of local men and women who have been brought together as a business co-operative to improve their financial income by selling their range of authentic crafts to 'muzungu' (tourists!). The group were given basic business and financial skills training and were introduced to the main backpackers hostal in Kampala , where an agreement has been made to start selling their goods later this year.

Disability Treatment and Access

We provided physiotherapy expertise to local disabled children and their families, including exercise prescription, manual handling training for carers and specialist aids when needed. Further work has been done at the community school, which included building a disabled access playground to help improve disability awareness and access within the community.

WhizzKids United Uganda

We successfully implemented the Whizzkids United programme into Uganda. The programme uses football as a fun and interactive tool to teach children the valuable life skills that will prevent them from contracting the HIV virus.

We have established a link with the secondary schools in the nearby town of Bombo, training two full-time coaches (Vincent and Isaac), to run the service every week during school term time. Furthermore, we linked up with AMREF Uganda to conduct a training workshop with AMREF staff and project managers, who will run the programme throughout the Luwero and Kiboga districts of Uganda.