May 2025

We hope you are keeping well and having a brilliant week. With us just having had Menstrual Hygiene Day on 28th May, we thought it would be a great time to share some updates with you all. 

Our team had been finding challenges in village communities where they had been running our usual trainings, where many young people are giving birth at young ages. This can make pregnancy and birth more risky, with obstructive labour (the baby becoming stuck during labour, often caused by girls giving birth before their pelvis has fully widened during puberty) being one of the biggest 4 causes of maternal death as well as complications such as fistulas, in Uganda. Often then the young people will leave the children with their parents, and then continue to have children with other people. This can put a high financial strain on the mamas who are often surviving from subsistence farming, as there are very few work opportunities in the village. This means that it is harder to find the money to cover these children's school fees (school is not free in Uganda), and for their medical bills (there is no free at point of service health care system here), and so often, this can force these families further into the poverty cycle. 

As a response to this, we began a new community training called the 'Life in abundance' course in a rural village. The course runs over a week, and we ran it twice during the school holidays, enjoying delicious lunches, whilst making use of dramas, dance and song to teach potentially life saving trainings. We used the brilliant 'Wise Choices for Life' curriculum, and covered topics such as 'Who am I and why am I here', 'Empowerment', 'Communication' and 'Critical thinking' to help them with general life skills, to feel more confident and empowered in making choices for their life. 

With 16 women dying each day in Uganda that we are aware of (it is likely that the number will be higher in rural areas where the mother was in a small clinic or at home) from causes related to pregnancy and birth, we wanted to share trainings to try to see these numbers reduced. These rates are far higher than I would be used to in the UK, and many here know of friends or family members who have died from pregnancy and birth. We therefore also trained on topics such as "Maternal mortality' and 'Planning a family' to empower people with knowledge on how to plan their families and to take simple steps to avoid these 4 main causes of maternal mortality, as well as 'Parenting' and 'The needs of a New Mum and Baby' to help people to be better able to meet the needs of their families; social, emotional as well as financial.

We had lots of fun and laughter despite the serious topics, and we hope that the groups we trained will continue to share their learning with their friends and family. It was so lovely to see different generations coming together to learn and grow in important life skills, and the first group enjoyed the training so much, that almost double the number of people than we had planned for attended the second course! The team did a brilliant job sharing these trainings and we're hoping to run the course in the next school holidays hopefully with groups of men too. 

Another exciting update is that Timothy has been running his 9 week training programme over one of our official radios. The radio he had been using last year, worked brilliantly, but was using a local system, rather than being shared on the air. This time, Timothy has been running the course on an official radio station, which broadcasts to people widely across the Eastern region of Uganda. He gets callers ringing to ask questions and he's been receiving great feedback. We're definitely of the opinion that if you have important information to share, it should be shared far and wide and we love this radio station which enables us to do just that!

Unfortunately at the beginning of the year, Uganda had another Ebola outbreak, with one of the patients having spent time in Mbale whilst infectious. The team did a wonderful job, explaining about Ebola, and how to stay safe, or what to do if anyone displayed symptoms, at the beginning of each of their training sessions (you can see Ketty here sharing one of the government Ebola posters with a community group). Despite having a number of outbreaks in Uganda, this was the first time that Mbale had been affected and many in villages had not realised that there had been cases in Mbale. The team did a brilliant job of sharing this vital information and we are so thankful that the outbreak has been official declared over and that the Department of Health did a great job of containing the outbreak, so there were minimal cases and fatalities. 

Our regular trainings continue and we are routinely running 6 trainings and 1 radio session per week with groups of 10-30 people. It continues to be really special to hear wonderful feedback from the groups we are training in about how they have appreciated the sessions and we love when people who have attended the groups have asked us to train groups in their communities too. It's great to see the menstrual and reproductive health sessions growing in a really organic way. We're so thankful that we get to continue doing this wonderful work!

Thank you so much for continuing to follow and support the work of Every Girl. We really appreciate you and are thankful we get to walk this journey with you!