100 Isingiro girls receive bursaries
The school dropout rate, especially of girls in Isingiro District, has been of major concern to authorities due to poverty levels in the area.
However this is set to change, at least in Nyakitunda and Kabuyanda sub counties, due to the intervention of a philanthropist who has promised to provide some relief.
The chief executive officer of JM Eagle Pipe, manufacturers of water pipes from USA, Walter Wang, has given 100 scholarships to girls for secondary education for four years. He announced the donation at Nyakamuri Primary School in Nyakitunda Sub County recently (July 16) while on a tour of Ruhiira Millennium Villages project.
Mr Wang announced the bursaries after project officer Dr David Siriri revealed that only about 20 per cent of girls in the project area who finish P7, continue to secondary while 80 per cent drop out even when they have attained the necessary grades to enable them continue, due to financial difficulty. The project has already been paying for 13 girls out of the 30 best performers in the project area.
“Our concern is that few girls who perform well in grades two and three end up pursuing secondary education because the project cannot afford to pay for all of them. If the girls are not educated in this region then the area is bound to have big challenges,” he said. After announcing the offer, Mr Wang counselled the children to focus on education as the biggest key to success.
“Read hard and listen to your parents’ wise counsel if you want to succeed and be future leaders of this country because location does not matter,” he said. He also donated 100 computers to schools in the project.
