The Road to the Library

Kitengesa is a small trading center in Buwuunga sub-county of Masaka District in the western part of the central region of Uganda. The trading center is only about five miles from the district headquarters, but it is in a typical rural area, with no electricity and only recently acquired running water. Most of the people who live there are peasant farmers, growing their own food and depending for their income on coffee and other cash crops.

These people are not rich, but they have had access to education for several generations now. They value it highly, and such money as they have goes first and foremost to sending their children to school. And since the Ugandan government introduced Universal Primary Education in 1997, the numbers of children in school are increasing rapidly. Thus Kitengesa and its neighboring parishes have a large and growing literate population — a survey conducted in 2002 identified well over 2000 people in the immediate neighbourhood who could read.

In 1996, Emmanuel Mawanda founded the first secondary school in the neighborhood. It is a private school, with no government funding, so it depends entirely on school fees except that the government, under the new Universal Secondary Education scheme has been paying it a capitation gratn for students recruited in 2007 and 2008.. Both grants and fees are necessarily low, at 60,000 Uganda shillings per term, or about $40. The school consists at present a couple of classroom blocks and dormitories (a single room each) for boys and girls. In the middle of 2007 it had about 300 students.

The library building is on the school’s land. It is a simple mud brick structure with a corrugated iron roof; but the building is good quality and it looks impressive when seen from the road that leads out of the trading center—especially at night, when it is the only building to be seen with electric light. It has become a local landmark and has added greatly to the school’s prestige. In 2008, however, we propose to move to a new site in order to accomodate a computer center and a community hall (see Plans for Expansion). The site is near to the present one, so students at the school will still be able to use the library - including its new computers.