Our grant of $5.0 million to the Mvule Trust provides scholarships for bright, needy Ugandan children to go to secondary school. In 2006, it sent 1303 children to school. The Mvule Trust is a registered NGO founded in 2005. It contributes to poverty alleviation in rural Uganda by supporting development projects for women, children and education.

The Trust focuses on educating girls in rural areas, due to Uganda’s wide urban-rural and boy-girl performance gaps. It gives 75 percent of scholarships to girls. The districts chosen have particularly poor transition rates from P.7 (the end of primary school) to secondary school, and unbalanced girl to boy ratios.

Scholarships cover school fees and other school contributions, such as library charges, uniform, books, pens, math set, hoe, basin and mattress (if boarding) as well as transport, mentoring, medical care and mosquito nets. Every effort is made to send children to local day schools. However, since only 11 sub-counties in Uganda have a secondary school, many attend a boarding school.

A small number of well-managed and progressive schools have also been selected as partner schools to work with the Trust. This minimizes administrative costs for the Trust and provides partner schools with a guaranteed revenue stream. It also helps these schools to carry out projects such as building libraries or science laboratories.