Uganda

The Uganda Spelling Bee is an annual spelling competition for primary school children with the aim of improving literacy, unlocking the children’s imagination and developing key life skills such as confidence, teamwork, critical thinking and presentation. It is conducted in both local languages for P.3 pupils and English and Sign Language for P.4 – P.7 pupils.

52% of Uganda’s population is children below the age of 15; they hold the key to the future. We designed the Spelling Bee to celebrate academic success and train these children to use a word’s definition, part of speech, and word origin as well as the knowledge of phonics as valuable literacy tools. In addition, we train in-service teachers in learner-centered literacy techniques and help schools to form reading clubs, because the journey is the reward.

In the last three years we have reached over 700,000 pupils in 800 schools and trained over 1,000 teachers across the country. We plan to reach every school and pupil in the next 5 years.