Every six months, our team travels to eight early childhood development (ECD) centers in Mayuge District to check in on the children we work with. In October 2025, we completed our second round of assessments, and what we found gave us real reasons to celebrate.
We assessed 232 children (124 girls, 108 boys) across four schools where we work directly—Buyemba, Musoli, Magamaga, and Damy—and four control schools where we do not. Here is what the numbers showed.
Children are recognising more letters and numbers
Back in April, only 15.6% of children could identify letters A–F. By October, that number had more than doubled to 35%. Number knowledge followed a similar path—the share of children who could count from 0–10 jumped from 16.8% to 48.1%.
Intervention schools are pulling ahead
Children in our four intervention schools consistently outperformed those in comparison schools across every area we tested—letters, numbers, and self-regulation. The gap is still modest, but it is growing in the right direction.
Self-belief and comprehension: one soaring, one still climbing
Over half of all children, 54.3% can now say their full name, their parents' names, their favourite meal, and the name of their village. That is a meaningful sign of growing confidence and communication. Comprehension is a different story: when asked questions about a short story, no child could answer correctly, and only 0.4% could recall as many as four words. This tells us that understanding spoken language and building meaning from stories is where our next big push needs to go.
What this means for our work
The data confirms that regular teacher support, weekly learner check-ins, and providing morning porridge are making a measurable difference. Children are learning. This is the right direction. But literacy and comprehension remain well below where we want them to be, and we know that school holidays cause children to slide back.
Our next steps are clear: deepen teacher coaching, bring parents into the learning journey at home, and keep showing up every term with the same discipline and care.
We are grateful to every child, teacher, and community member in Mayuge who made this assessment possible.