Fifteen years of keeping a classroom door open
Edna Pre and Primary School opened in 2011 with two classrooms and 40 pupils. Today it teaches 412+ children across pre-primary and primary levels, roughly 168 of whom attend on full or partial sponsorship.
How we started
Edna was founded by a group of Kampala teachers who kept meeting the same problem: bright children turned away from school, not for lack of ability, but because their families couldn’t cover uniform, meal or material costs that government schools assume parents will pay. They started with two rented rooms and a borrowed blackboard.
Fifteen years on, Edna owns its own compound: 14 classrooms, a kitchen serving lunch to every pupil, and a small library corner we are actively raising funds to expand into a full room.
How the school runs today
22 teachers cover pre-primary through Primary 7, following the Ugandan national curriculum. Roughly four in ten pupils are on full or partial sponsorship; the remainder pay reduced termly fees that cover only a portion of the school’s real running costs. The gap — fees, salaries, meals, repairs — is closed by individual and corporate sponsors around the world.
94% of pupils who reach Primary 5 at Edna go on to sit their Primary Leaving Examinations, well above the surrounding district average — something we credit directly to consistent meals, small class sizes and sponsors who stay with a child for multiple years rather than one term.
