Backup Uganda

Backup Uganda envisions an education system that is able to give all learners – including children with learning difficulties & disabilities – the individualized support that they need to achieve their goals in education and in life. To achieve this, we are committed to promoting and providing individualized attention for learners in Uganda, particularly those with learning difficulties & disabilities. We do this by pursuing the following objectives:

1. To build the capacity of teachers, school administrators, other education professionals, parents and other community members to identify, support and where necessary refer children with possible learning difficulties & disabilities. 

2. To co-create innovative approaches to inclusive education for children with learning difficulties & disabilities together with educators, learners, families and communities; 

3. To advocate for the needs of children with learning difficulties & disabilities at local, national and international levels. 

4. To exchange knowledge, skills and experiences between professionals in the education sector on an international level.

Our core values include:

- Diversity: We acknowledge and respect that all human beings are unique, having their own individual preferences and valid needs.
- Equity:  We understand that these preferences and needs are best met with individualized approaches and we design our programs accordingly.
- Empowerment: We believe empowering (student) teachers, administrators, teacher educators, other education professionals, parents, and communities at large is the key to progress for the education sector for all and leaving no one behind.
- Sustainability: We build and implement our programs with sustainability as our main focus: lasting impact trumps short term successes.
- Transparency:  We are committed to being open, honest and accountable at all levels for every step we take.

Our Team Lead Fred Onyango is Backup Uganda’s current Uganda Country Director. He leads the organization’s day-to-day management when it comes to all programs, projects and general strategies. Additionally, he is responsible for the coordination of Backup Uganda’s NGO compliance, human resource management, and monitoring, evaluation, assessment and learning. He oversees the organization’s financial administration and plays a connecting role in the fundraising and partnership-building efforts. Finally, he represents Backup Uganda in networks like the Uganda INGO Country Directors Network.

Our Team Lead (Fred Onyango), Lead Trainer (Glades Lanyero) and Fundraising & Partnerships Coordinator (Annemaaike Kruisselbrink-Oweitu) would be the senior staff members supporting the LEAP Project. Fred, Glades and Annemaaike have all been part of the podcast production and distribution process since its inception in 2020. They have created content for the episodes, recorded them with guests, edited the audio recordings, transcribed the content, manually translated episodes from English to local languages, and distributed them in the communities we serve. They have reviewed the earlier distribution strategies, made improvements, and tracked the podcast’s outputs and outcomes so far. Fred and Glades currently share the responsibility for the MEAL aspects of the podcast, Glades and Annemaaike coordinate approaching new guests, balancing the content for the episodes, their recording and distribution, Fred and Annemaaike work together to mobilize resources to continue and grow the podcast, and Glades leads her trainers team in the editing, transcription and translation process.

At the moment, the Every Child Can Learn community podcast takes up approximately 25% of our team’s time, as it is one of our core programs. This means our senior staff members mentioned above already have time booked in their schedules to dedicate to the podcast and related efforts that will improve its quality and reach, like the LEAP Project. To free up some additional time for the senior staff members involved, the trainers team can take up more responsibilities when it comes to the recording, editing, translation and distribution phases. All in all, our team is committed to creating sufficient time to support the LEAP Project, as improvements in our community podcast have a positive impact on our other programs as well - it will catalyze the impact of our teacher training program, for example.

The Every Child Can Learn community podcast strengthens parents’ and caregivers’ awareness and knowledge of learning difficulties and disabilities.

Approximately 16% of the world population lives with a form of disability (1). This includes difficulties and disabilities in learning, with an example like dyslexia affecting about 9-12% globally (2). Yet, inclusive education for persons with disabilities is a relatively recent concept that is still a work in progress in every country that is making efforts to turn it into reality. Several milestones were reached before inclusive education became a fully defined approach with practical guidelines, such as the Salamanca Declaration and Framework for Action in 1994 and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD) in 2008 (3). In 2016, General Comment 4 to article 24 of the UNCRPD offered a first of a kind definition and explanation of inclusive education that is currently being used as a worldwide standard. 

Despite Uganda’s ratification of the UNCRPD and its Persons with Disabilities Act (2019)(4), a concerning oversight persists regarding the educational support for children with disabilities in general and learning difficulties and disabilities in particular. Inclusive education is yet to be defined and described in Uganda’s National Inclusive Education Policy - currently being finalized under the leadership of the Special Needs & Inclusive Education Department of Uganda’s Ministry of Education & Sports. Practical challenges to implementing inclusive education in Uganda include constraints in human, financial and other tangible resources, knowledge gaps, and unsupportive attitudes and beliefs. Yet, this is a pressing issue, as the 2017 Uganda Functional Difficulties Survey (5) reveals that approximately 7% (5-17 years) of the 19.9 million children in Uganda live with one or more disabilities and 11.8% experience a disability related to learning. 

A substantial deficit in knowledge exists regarding identifying and supporting children with learning difficulties and disabilities, particularly at primary school level. A 2023 baseline survey by Backup Uganda in Gulu District and City highlighted a critical gap in understanding, with only 36% of parents and caregivers ever having identified specific learning difficulties and disabilities among people they know, while 28.6% had offered support. We address this gap with our Every Child Can Learn community podcast, by making the episodes available to parents and caregivers in multiple languages. Through this approach, they learn how to recognize signs of possible learning difficulties and disabilities in children as early as possible, how to offer individualized support from their various roles, and where to look for more help when needed.

1:  World Health Organization (2023). Disability Fact Sheet. Accessed via https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/disability-and-health.

2: European Dyslexia Association (2020). What is dyslexia. Accessed via https://eda-info.eu/what-is-dyslexia/.

3: United Nations (2008). Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

4: The Republic of Uganda (2019). The Persons with Disabilities Act. Uganda: Kampala.

5: UBOS (2017). Uganda Functional Difficulties Survey 2017. Uganda: Kampala.

The Every Child Can Learn community podcast strengthens parents’ and caregivers’ awareness and knowledge of learning difficulties and disabilities. It teaches listeners how to recognize early signs of learning difficulties and disabilities in the children they raise and how to support them in an inclusive way. Ultimately, this ensures that every child in Uganda has an opportunity to benefit from high quality, inclusive education.

All episodes are available on www.backupuganda.org/learning, thanks to technical and financial support from Brainstud and the Frostig Centre. To date, we have recorded, edited, translated and distributed 28 episodes in English and Acoli within Gulu district, Northern Uganda. Episodes can be played on any device that has a speaker function and memory space or a provision for external memory use. As the episodes are available in multiple languages, online and offline and in audio and transcript format, limited literacy, access to internet, language and limited hearing and auditory processing ability are no barriers to access the podcast content. The podcast offers a unique opportunity to share and benefit from local expertise, as members of the communities we serve are welcomed to share their own experiences and knowledge as podcast guests and can request for specific content to be covered.

In the coming years, we intend to translate the current and future episodes to all commonly spoken languages in Uganda in partnership with Sunbird AI, including languages used by the vast refugee population settled along the borders with South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. This will be a crucial step towards our goal of distributing the episodes nationally in Uganda and possibly beyond its borders.

This solution catalyzes the significant impact that other initiatives have made when it comes to increasing access to quality education. As we see more children with disabilities and other special needs going to school through various interventions, our podcast adds value by ensuring that this investment is worthwhile.

To date, we have primarily focused on formative research to assess the effectiveness of the Every Child Can Learn community podcast. We have done baseline and end line measurements at two physical locations that our team had identified to play the first 6 podcast episodes at. These included Gulu Main Market and Olailong Market, both located in Gulu City. We started by assessing to what extent the vendors - majority being parents and caregivers - had identified children with learning difficulties or disabilities among those they know; to what extent they had communicated about this with relevant others (e.g. schools); and to what extent they had offered support to the children’s inclusive learning. To do this, we used a written questionnaire in Acoli, the main local language used in Gulu. Our team asked the questions verbally and wrote down the answers given for vendors who were not able to read and/or write. After this, over the course of 6 weeks we played episodes 1-6 in Acoli on a speaker in various sections of the markets and offered time for questions and sharing experiences after each episode. Finally, we repeated the questions asked at the start to serve as an end line measurement and compared the analyzed data collected before and after the episodes were played.

The data our team collected from listeners at Gulu Main Market and Olailong Market was comparable. We noticed a strong increase in the number of listeners who had identified one or more children with a possible learning difficulty or disability: from 33% to 89.5% at Gulu Main Market and from 36% to 82% at Olailong Market. At both markets, the majority of listeners were able to use correct terminology after listening to the podcast episodes, from 47% to 68.4% at Gulu Main Market and from 64.3% to 91% at Olailong Market. However, communication with supporting institutions or services showed a minimal, insignificant increase. Listeners’ support towards learning for the children they had identified, on the other hand, grew up to 78.9% at Gulu Main Market and from 28.6% to 91% at Olailong Market. As the initial baseline questionnaire used at Gulu Main Market had a challenge in the question asked about support, we do not have a starting percentage to compare the end line data with. Interestingly, supporting children’s inclusive learning in particular was hardly mentioned, answers given were about learning in general. This may have been connected to the open way our team asked this question (‘How have you supported them so far?’). Lastly, while this was not part of the baseline and end line measurements, our team noticed that only a few listeners accepted the offer for the episodes to be transferred to their devices, allowing them to share with others.

The data collected about the effects of our community podcast have informed us that the content of the first 6 episodes enables the majority of listeners to identify children with learning difficulties and disabilities, to use correct terminology in referring to them, and to offer general support towards their learning. We have learned that we should consider including additional episodes about how to communicate with supporting institutions and services. In addition, we would like to inquire what barriers listeners may be facing related to this aspect. Finally, we learned that our intended snowball distribution strategy - where listeners receive the episodes and pass them on to others - may not be as effective as we had hoped and needs re-evaluation.

After producing 28 community podcast episodes, distributing them online and offline in multiple ways and learning from the data as reflected above, we have realized that our solution - with room for improvement - has the potential to serve larger numbers of parents and caregivers in Uganda, as long as we make efforts now to critically reflect on and strengthen our current distribution strategies, dive deeper into the exact relationship between our podcast episodes and their effect on our listeners, and ensure maximum accessibility. With support from the LEAP Fellows, we see an opportunity to study the effectiveness of the various possible distribution strategies, including their cost-effectiveness when considering a larger scale. Secondly, we see a need to further research the connection between the content of our podcast episodes and the way listeners utilize this content, while eliminating other potential influences on their actions as much as possible. Our current data collection efforts only show a possible correlation. Additionally, we would like to take our data collection beyond the listeners only and assess the podcast’s impact on the children our organization has set out to support. Thirdly and lastly, what we have not assessed yet but intend to, is the accessibility of our current podcast episodes for listeners, specifically those living with additional needs. As mentioned, we have made efforts to maximize this by availing both audio recordings and transcripts in multiple languages, online and offline. However, we have not yet verified our alignment with listeners’ accessibility needs.

1. What are the most effective and cost-efficient distribution strategies for the Every Child Can Learn community podcast in Uganda?

2. To what extent is the Every Child Can Learn community podcast currently accessible to listeners, including listeners with additional needs?

3. What areas of improvement can significantly grow the Every Child Can Learn community podcast’s impact on the listeners and their children?

Through formative research, like user interviews and usability studies - possibly combined with elements of accessibility audits - we would benefit greatly from jointly building an accessibility framework for the Every Child Can Learn community podcast. Summative research - especially an impact evaluation and/or a correlational study - could lead to helpful strategic recommendations in relation to the content of the podcast episodes and the distribution strategy, as it will tell us how both aspects are connected to the impact of the podcast. All of these outputs will support our preparations to get our solution ready to be scaled up to available country-wide in Uganda.

The accessibility framework mentioned in the previous answer will help us ensure that our intended podcast listeners have straightforward access to all episodes, as it will help us plan for additional specific preferred languages and modes of accessing the content. As our podcast content focuses on inclusion, we want to set this example in the accessibility of the episodes as well. The framework will also support us in monitoring and evaluating our own progress towards maximum accessibility through listeners’ experiences.

The strategic recommendations related to the impact of the podcast content and our distribution strategy will support us in optimizing both, so that as many parents and caregivers as possible benefit from information that helps them identify, communicate about and support children with learning difficulties and disabilities. The recommendations will guide our team in deciding what next steps to prioritize as we get ready to share the podcast in more languages and more districts in Uganda (and possibly beyond). We will be able to test the recommendations for both the content and the distribution strategy immediately and learn our lessons before scaling up our solution further. For example, in relation to the content we will be able to look for guests who can share about topics and approaches that will address any current gaps in understanding among our targeted listeners.

In turn, these improvements will help us continue to generate stronger evidence of our solution’s effectiveness, which will aid our access to the resources we need to grow the podcast’s reach. Together with the LEAP Fellows, we hope to come to an impact evaluation or correlational study design that we can repeat independently in the future to keep this process going.

Following the steps described above will give our team the chance to reach a significantly larger number of parents and caregivers in Uganda with the Every Child Can Learn podcast in an effective and cost-efficient way. These listeners will learn how to identify possible learning difficulties and disabilities in their children, how to communicate about this with others who can offer inclusive support towards learning, and how to play a supportive role themselves. As a consequence, the children will experience a more inclusive approach overall: their parents and caregivers will know how and why to demand for an inclusive learning environment at school, how to make sure their home setting encourages this as well, and where to look for additional specialist services if necessary. Outside the LEAP Project, our team implements solutions to support teachers’ professional development in inclusive education and children’s peer-to-peer support simultaneously to ensure a holistic approach. Ultimately, this all contributes to every child in Uganda benefiting from high-quality inclusive education.