Welcome to          Uganda Development Initiative!

 

These are some of the beautiful faces of the children at our school in Nyakabungo.

UDI is also interested in the ecological economy of Uganda and the world. Education creates a generation who can see beyond their immediate needs. Uganda is a land of incredible beauty with National Parks, astounding waterfalls, the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest which houses the mountain Gorillas, and much more. Winston Churchill called Uganda "the pearl of Africa" Despite it's difficulties that beauty still exists and bio tourism is part of our educational plan.

GOALS FOR UDI

Uganda Development Initiative has used the United Nations Millennium Development Goals as a template for our own mission tailoring them to the specific needs of Uganda.

We believe that education is the unique element to fulfilling every other need not only in Uganda but in all of the emerging world.

Education can eradicate the disease of poverty and hunger by teaching modern agricultural farming methods, proper conservation of farm land, and teaching proper nutrition. Education can also create engineers and social scientists who can build infrastructure which can get food from areas of abundance where surplus bananas rot to areas of great need where it can be sold. 

Education can create gender equality in several ways. First, young women can be taught the danger of early marriage (12-14 yrs) which will reduce infant and maternal mortality exponentially. These young women, not marrying as children themselves, have a possibility of further education giving them a trade as well as a better understanding of health and birth issues.  Infant mortality will also be reduced by the college students learning child development now at Great Lakes College who will be moving into the field yearly. 

The devastating diseases of HIV-AIDS, Malaria, Tuberculosis and parasitic infection could be controlled if the aid situation was handled differently.

UDI does not believe in just  throwing money at a problem. Wherever we send aid we make sure that we have a viable program in place, and we ALWAYS try to resource our programs locally.  It does no good to take a million dollars from the USA, buy goods from China and send them to Africa. It does not stimulate their economy at all. Africans who could be producing the goods themselves are left completely out of the equation.  Also, if dollars are sent directly to governments they are likely to stay at the top floors of the statehouses.

 Education and encouragement of the entrepreneur is a slower way to work but we want to make sure that the Ugandan people are fully involved and invested in their own recovery.