Givology - give to learn, learn to give

Fatinah is a student in Educate!’s Socially Responsible Leadership Course that focuses on the entrepreneurial and leadership skills students need to find solutions to poverty, violence, disease and environmental degradation.

Educate! trains teachers who become mentors to their students (like Fatinah), building powerful relationships that give youth the confidence to lead change. The mentor also facilitates the Educate! Social Entrepreneurship Club that gives students like Fatinah practical business skills while aiming to solve a community need. The amount requested covers the cost of training, salary and transportation for the Educate! mentor, as well as all materials/handouts/textbooks provided in the Socially Responsible Leadership Course.

Once you listen to Fatinah, you don’t want to stop. She is audacious, ambitious and yet very realistic. She is not afraid of making mistakes, but she is very afraid of not learning from them. A student of History, Economics, Christian Religious Education and Art, Fatinah would like to see increased access to family planning information and amenities (particularly voluntary HIV testing and counseling) for rural women in Uganda. In the future she plans to start a bakery to provide employment and skills for uneducated women in her home village.

As part of the Educate! program at her school, Fatinah is the Speaker of the Social Entrepreneurship Club (SEC). Pinpointing environmental degradation as their pressing issue, Fatinah was the chief architect of the Greenhill College SEC project - a Tree Planting Project. With no start-up capital, Fatinah and her fellow members collected fruit seeds from the school compound and surrounding community. They germinated the seeds in used plastic water bags (thereby reducing community waste) and sell the seedlings to the local community. Their planting project includes jackfruit, pawpaw, avocado, mango and jambula. Their goals are to conserve the environment, provide a future source of income to the club, and improve nutrition. With the funds gained from the Tree Planting Project, the SEC has started a new venture of paper bead jewellery using recycled colour paper. The SEC members also cleaned the community well this term as a voluntary community service project.

Fatinah’s Educate! mentor James Katumba says of her “Fatinah is a good student, not just in school, but in the community as well. She draws inspiring lessons from her rural experience and effortlessly applies concepts from the Socially Responsible Leadership Course to her village setting. Being in the Educate! program not only benefits Fatinah, but also benefits the young women in her deeply rural setting of Eastern Uganda”.