Delta Education Collective

Delta Education Collective: A first-time grantee in 2022-23

Inspired by the power of community-led development, Delta Education Collective was founded in 2019 in Uganda as a community-driven movement to create quality education for all.  They organize parents, educators, students, community leaders, and local stakeholders to take ownership of their schools’ academic performance. Community members combine local resources and expertise to solve their biggest challenges and ensure their children get high-quality education.  Delta started with 16 schools in Nwoya, a district in Northern Uganda that is still recovering from a devastating conflict with the 5th lowest educational performance in the country. 

Uganda is a great example of the urgency we face globally to solve education inequity: over half the population is below the age of fifteen, and while most children have access to school, only 41% of 12-year-olds are literate, and 43% are numerate. 

After Delta launched in May of 2019, each of the 16 communities agreed on five goals that would most move the needle on academic performance in their school.  By the end of that year, Delta’s communities had achieved 80% of their goals.  With this momentum, they began 2020 enthusiastically but were shocked when schools closed indefinitely in March as a result of the pandemic.  Students in Uganda were hit exceptionally hard, losing more school days to COVID than any other country in the world. 

As the pandemic lockdown eased but the threat to education grew, Delta worked with community members in June of 2020 to design a way for students to learn safely. Local leaders organized children by neighborhoods, assembled local volunteer teachers, and utilized learning resources from shuttered schools to start small group learning at safe distances under mango trees. Their commitment helped over 5,000 students to learn daily and become the first to return to school and at the head of their classes.  No students learning in these neighborhood clusters got pregnant amidst a rampant teen pregnancy crisis. 

Delta currently partners with 41 schools, encouraging communities to take ownership of their education challenges and leverage their often-undervalued experience, insights, wisdom, and resources to design sustainable solutions.  Delta’s team consists of 19 community coaches and 41 Village Education Volunteers (VEVs, one from each school community) and Project Redwood is supporting the VEVs work in 2022. VEVs work with their coaches to engage parents, students, and teachers to set school goals, implement action plans to achieve them, mobilize participation, sensitize people on the power of quality education, and analyze academic improvement – it takes a village!

Delta is currently focusing on proving that their community-driven approach can improve academic performance before expanding to primary schools nationwide. This national constituency of community leaders transforming their schools will then engage with the Ministry of Education and Sports to revise and implement policies that improve education quality nationally. They look forward to opening their doors to any social entrepreneur around the world to learn from their experience and model and bring this global education equity movement to their communities, creating quality education for all!

For more information, see: https://www.deltacollective.org/