Africa-Press – Uganda. Rotary District 9213 has launched a programme to promote literacy in the country.
Under the programme, members of Rotary clubs across the country will dedicate an hour every week to supervise reading and literacy classes in pre-primary, primary and secondary schools.
In an interview yesterday, Mr Mike Sebalu, the governor of district 9213, said the basic education and literacy enhancement project dubbed ‘Drop Everything And Read (DEAR)’ is aimed at enhancing reading, writing and comprehension in schools so as to improve the quality of education in country.
This is because, he said, currently, the culture of reading is slowly dying out.
“In offices, you find people are given reports to read through and take action, but they abandon them. Newspapers have great information to increase your level of knowledge, but when you ask a journalist about a topic in the newspaper of how and when it happened, he does not know because of not reading,” Mr Sebalu said.
He explained that at the end of the one-year campaign, they expect to transform the reading culture in the country, stock school libraries and also make strides in Rotary Club’s thematic areas of interventions, which include peace and conflict resolution, water and sanitation, economic and community development, promoting literacy, and child and maternal health.
He explained that education is an enabler of social transformation.
Mr Sebalu said last Friday, all the 86 Rotary clubs across the country participated in the simultaneous launch of the reading campaign at 11am. They worked with 250 schools, donated 10,000 books and interacted with 15,000 students. The launch at Mulago School of the Deaf was officiated by the American Ambassador, Ms Natalie Brown and Kampala Capital City Authority Executive Director Dorothy Kissaka.
Government schools, which participated in the exercise, included St Peters Primary School, Nsambya, and Kira Primary School. The two schools were supervised by Rotary Club of Upper Kololo and Rotary Club of Kira, respectively.
Ms Joyce Odoki Sadoori, the administrator of Rotary Club of Upper Kololo, said every week, they will be moving in different schools to supervise the exercise and also donate books, urging members of the public with reading materials they do not need, to donate to their club.
The campaign launch coincided with the day government released a 2021 report that revealed that of the 8.5 million pupils enrolled in primary school, only 39.5 percent from Primary Three to Seven have the required reading competencies.
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