Since last Monday, our team has been on the road, travelling from district to district to bring one of our favourite traditions back to life: the District Spelling Bee.
So far, we have held competitions in Jinja, Mayuge, Tororo, Mbale, Kole, and Kiryandongo, with more stops planned before the upcountry tour wraps up this week. From there, we will head to the Kampala metropolitan region, where district competitions will continue to roll out.
This year's tour carries something we are especially excited about: the return of the Junior Spelling Bee. For the first time in a while, children aged 6 to 8 years old from all over the country are stepping up to the microphone, spelling out words with the same confidence and joy we usually see from the older children (9-12 year olds). Watching six-year-olds spell with such focus and pride is a reminder of why this work matters: reading is a skill that can and should be nurtured from the very beginning.
Of all the stops on this tour, Mayuge has been the most exciting. Mayuge is the pilot district for our ECD Teacher Training program, equipping early childhood educators with the skills to nurture young readers. We have deployed teacher coaches who offer weekly visits to each of the 20+ schools on our program. This year, these schools also benefited from our Library stocking campaign, which has put books directly into the hands of children who may never have owned one before. The bee is one of our key enrichment programs, built to ensure that every child can read, count, and thrive.
This is all part of our vision of ensuring that all Ugandan children can read, count, and thrive. And Mayuge is a testament that this is possible only when learners have access to books and have well-trained teachers. The spelling bee then becomes a testing ground for some of the learning milestones acquired within the classroom.
This year, all the program schools in Mayuge sent their children to compete in the Junior Spelling Bee with some of them even emerging winners. The bigger lesson from this is that when a child has a well-trained teacher guiding their early reading, a library stocked with books to practise with, and now, a stage to show off what they have learned, their literacy is guaranteed.
We are genuinely excited to see what the results will show at the end of the year. If this is what we are seeing already, we can only imagine what continued investment in these schools will produce. As we close out the upcountry leg of this tour and prepare to bring the energy to Kampala, we want to say thank you to our donors, our partners, schools, parents, and everyone who continues to make it possible for children across Uganda to have these moments.
We will keep you updated as the competitions continue and the results come in. This is only the beginning of the story for 2026.