We as Firefly Wamu stand for cooperation between Uganda and Germany, in which everyone involved learns and benefits, with the goal: Creating more education together! Along with our project partners and some families on Kalangala (Ssese Island, Lake Victoria, Uganda), we follow the Ugandan Model, financing and accompanying the educational path of 14 adolescents and young adults.

We are in a constant learning process. Time and again, we are faced with the challenge of how to lead created dependencies into autonomy without creating more along the way. Is cooperation possible without implementing the values of the global North?

By questioning internal mechanisms within the association, we restructured our local support, gained new cooperation partners and created new opportunities for the students.

They now go to boarding schools on the main island of Kalangala, which is very common in Uganda. We follow a Ugandan support model: people who are financially better off in Uganda help pay the school costs of other pupils. We also cover the school costs, but the families continue to bear the main responsibility. To facilitate transparency, pupils and parents sign a contract that clarifies the funding conditions.

Contract with pupils and parents

Not just talking about social and ecological commitment, but actively tackling it themselves and staying consistent: Since October 2015, students and alumni of the Humboldt-Gymnasium in Cologne have been involved in the association they founded, Firefly Wamu e.V. (fka Firefly Uganda e.V.)

Together with our project partner at the time, we implemented ecological infrastructure and school construction projects on the Ssese Islands from 2015-2021. During these 6 years, our partners came into contact with families who could no longer afford to pay for their childrens school and transportation costs. They therefore lived in the Firefly Camp for a few years.

During these years in the camp, a form of dependency was created that we now see as problematic. We acknowledge that there should have been more cooperation with Ugandans from the outset, to learn from Ugandan culture and to prioritize the return of young people to their familiar family structures.

In spring 2022, there was a break with our cooperation partner on the Ssese Islands at the time. We no longer shared the same idea of how best to support the young people.

As an association, we have spent a long time thinking about how to deal with the situation. After many difficult discussions, we as an association found a goal that unites us: to support the 14 young people we had accompanied on their journey through life up to that point in their school education.

We now see it as our task to learn from these experiences and create a model of support that promotes autonomy.