В Уганде впервые наградили мужчин-союзников за поддержку образования девочек

For two decades, the Forum for African Women Educationalists (FAWE) Uganda Chapter has built its reputation on enhancing opportunities for girls to attain quality education and skills through sponsorship, social protection, institutional strengthening, and advocacy. At its Annual General Meeting in Kampala on July 11, 2026, it spent much of the day doing something else: celebrating men. FAWE Uganda named eight Male Champions of Uganda Girls Education and Women Empowerment, honoured a wider circle of educationists and student leaders, and with a posthumous award to Dr. Martin Jerome Okec Aliker, the businessman who chaired the Chapter’s scholarship programme from 2000 to 2008 and died in April 2024. FAWE is a Pan-African NGO founded in 1992 by five African women ministers of education, to confront one shared problem: how badly girls were faring in school across the continent. It now operates through 34 national chapters, Uganda’s among them since 1997. The Uganda Chapter’s vision has stayed consistent since then: a Ugandan society where girls and women lead dignified lives. The choice to honour men this year is deliberate. FAWE Uganda has argued education of the girl child, gender equity and empowerment need advocates and male allies. This year, FAWE Uganda decided to honour the male champions, contrary to popular beliefs and growing misogyny in Ugandan society. Dr. Aliker’s widow, Camille Aliker, has long been recognised among FAWE Uganda’s own Women of Distinction in her own right. Mrs.Aliker was present to receive her husband’s award. Dr Aliker built strong structures. Working alongside Dr. Charles Mbire, the chairman of MTN Uganda and Founding Chairman of the FAWE Uganda Higher Education Scholarship Committee, Aliker demonstrated, at a time when few believed it possible, that Uganda’s private sector could be persuaded to underwrite girls’ education in a structured and sustained manner. FAWE Uganda has now resolved to revive that partnership model, this time looking beyond the two men who first proved it could work. The AGM’s living honourees carried the same argument into the present. Prof. Paul Waako, the vice chancellor of Busitema University, and Prof. George Ladaah Openjuru, Vice Chancellor of Gulu University, were both recognised, alongside Prof. David Kani Olema, Dean of Busitema University’s Faculty of Science and Education and Technical Team Lead for FAWE Uganda’s Higher Education Access Certificate Programme. Mr. Kenneth Kimera, a longstanding educationist, was honoured too, as was Dickens Kiyonga, a scholarship participant who mobilised fellow students to raise over Shs 11 million towards girls’ education, proof that the campaign for the girl child in Uganda now counts volunteers as young as the students it serves. There is also a number worth printing. Six hundred young women and men are entering FAWE Uganda’s Mastercard Foundation Higher Education Access Programme, known as HEAP, for the 2026/2027 academic year. It builds on a programme that has already supported 1,293 (1,026 Female, 267 Male) students from Uganda’s most underserved regions, evidence that the affirmative model works when districts outside Kampala are targeted deliberately rather than incidentally. This systemic reach is part of a broader shift in FAWE Uganda’s model. In 2025 alone, FAWE Uganda reached over 126,000 direct and indirect participants, transitioning from simple projectbased interventions to a robust model of systems influence. By aligning with national frameworks and targeting districts outside Kampala, FAWE is not just supporting individual girls; it is engineering a national education environment where gender equity is a standard, not an exception. Three things are worth watching over the next year. FAWE Uganda intends to reunite the Women of Distinction and Models of Excellence it has honoured since 2000, a formidable roster that includes former Vice President H.E. Dr. Specioza Wandira Kazibwe, Her Royal Highness Sylvia Nagginda, the Nnaabagereka of Buganda, and Mrs. Camille Aliker, alongside diplomats who served in Uganda through the 2000s. FAWE Uganda’s own alumni, among them Jackline Auma, Grace Nanyonga and Dr. Violet Okaba-Kayom, carry the Chapter’s 20KforTransformation campaign further than it has gone before. There is a lesson in a women’s rights organisation choosing to spend its biggest day of the year applauding men. FAWE Uganda is wagering that Uganda’s men, in classrooms, boardrooms and lecture halls, are not obstacles to girls’ education but its missing allies. The writer is the Communications Officer at FAWE Uganda.