Bunjakko Community and Youth Uplifted

Bunjakko Community and Youth Uplifted was founded with the sole purpose of uplifting the livelihood of the local population whose needs range from public health care to quality education among others.

About Bunjakko Bunjakko is a special place in Uganda located 20km from Buwama along Kampala - Masaka highway. Bunjakko is an island and a peninsular, this is brought about by the seasons, during rainy seasons Bunjakko is engulfed by the waters from Lake Victoria and this means access to the island is only by dugout canoes and in the dry season, the water recede turning Bunjakko into a peninsular. Bunjakko is ideal for tourism attraction especially for birders because of its unique tropical rain forests makes a home of many bird species e.g.; the fish eagles, king fishers, the rare shoe-bill which is occasionally sighted in the Bunjakko swamps. Bunjakko has a population of about 7000 subsistence farmers and fisher men.

Education Bunjakko has one primary school founded by Mrs. Nakafeero Rosemary (76) in 2009. The school is in a very sorry state because lessons are conducted in the open space and some are conducted under trees and only infants are getting lessons from a temporary shelter with bare no basic school supplies like chalks, papers and other scholastic materials. The school has only four (4) teaching staff taking care of 400 pupils. The teachers are not paid, these are not professional teachers but just secondary school dropouts who just volunteer to pass on the little knowledge they attained to the young generation and the local population supplies these volunteer teachers with food to sustain them. Since the local population depends on these children as a labour force, a big number of the school misses school days during the rain and coffee harvest season as they are busy helping their parents in the coffee plantations. Before a school was founded in Bunjakko, it was very hard for children with school going age (4-12) to walk to the only neighboring school which is 20kilometers away, besides the long distances , the large thickets and bushes of Bunjakko are habitats for small but dangerous wild animals like pythons, crocodiles, cheeter among others.

Health Bunjakko is so neglected in terms of Health care whereby it’s only very inadequately equipped single dispensary supplies a population of over 7000 people and most of these are young adults and in most cases the cases reported are as a result of avoidable diseases like;

• Malaria

• Bilharzia

• Diarrhea

• Jiggers

BUYOU – Is working hard to see that these problems are addressed through sensitizing the local population to value the boiling water for drinking, though access to clean water is still a big problem in the area because the community uses water from the lake which is highly contaminated resulting to high rates of bilharzia cases.

Malaria cases are also high as Bunjakko has a very conducive weather for the breeding of the malaria causing mosquitoes, basing on that fact that Bunjakko is populated by very mostly poor peasant subsistence farmers and fishing communities to afford mosquito nets and proper sleeping materials, people are left with no choice but to become victims of these deadly mosquitoes.

Diarrhea is also caused by the fact that the local population is very lacking as fur as public health and hygiene is concerned. Very few households have proper toilets and they mostly use bushes and scrubs that are around their homes instead of toilets.

BUYOU is here to see that we help the community see a change.

- Building permanent school structures for the only school in Bunjakko.

- Issue free mosquito nets to the local population

- Construct 3 (three) model public toilets in Bunjakko

- Construct bower holes and spring wells around Bunjakko

- Establish a modern secondary school