New Year and New Plans for St Zoes

Over the last 2 years we have been thinking about how to develop the St Zoe Campus of Primary, Secondary and Vocational Schools together with 65 acres of farms. When we started the Charity it was simple. Fr John Kyazze and his brother managed things and this worked very well until about 3 years ago when we started the Secondary School and the building of the Vocational School. Combine this with one of the worst droughts and periods of national inflation in 2010 and 2011 and from an organisation point of view the local management was doing a great job teaching the primary age children (top 5% of all Ugandan schools) but things related to administration and development really demanded more than could be handled.
We also got thinking about the future. Title to all the buildings and land were with Fr John's family and we had plenty of warning signs from other schools that this can be a great vulnerability.
So we decided in the spring of this year that a major action plan was needed to address these weaknesses and equip St Zoes with the management experience and skills to build the sort of schools we all agreed was possible.
Following a long period of planning the decision was taken to transfer all the real estate and other assets to an order of Catholic Sisters called the Gogonya Sisters and their team moves to St Zoe's on Monday 6th January.

They will have a team of 5 Sisters led by Dr. Speranza Namusisi whose CV is really impressive;
PhD Innsbruck University in Austria in Socio cultural and Girl child issues
Makerere MA English and dissertation of Code switching in schools
BA in English language
Senior lecturere in UMU and Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Science
Head of Dept Languages
She will be site Director. Other members of the team will head up Primary, Secondary, Vocational and Administrative functions.

For HUGS and for St Zoes this is a huge decision but one that has been taken after a great deal of thought and planning.

Parent, Local leaders, Local Government and other bodies have all been widely consulted.

We have promised to fund some proper accommodation on site for the team, just like we did for the team at Good Shepherd.

No doubt the next few months will have some problems but we will help where we can.

Denise and Peter (and others?) plan to visit later this year to get to know the team.