Kigarama PEAS High School is situated in the strong coffee growing district of Sheema, is one of eight new PEAS secondary schools in Uganda that opened to students for the first time on 4th February 2013.
The majority of the population in the sub-county of Kigarama are involved in rural livelihoods, which brings limited returns. In 2012, our research revealed that 381 students who had completed primary school had no easily accessible secondary school to continue their education. There is one secondary school in an adjacent sub-county, but in addition to its inaccessible location, it is already heavily over-subscribed, with over 480 students enrolled in S1.
The impossibly large class-sizes lead to many students receiving a poor quality education and ultimately, dropping out of education altogether. As the only secondary school in the sub-county of Kigarama, the new school will immediately serve the hundreds of students who had previously been denied the opportunity of a high-quality education, as well as the many generations that will follow them.
[related_posts]This school will ensure a better future for coffee-growing families relying on rural, agriculture-based livelihoods, and help to check the huge growth in rural-urban migration, which is creating large numbers of unemployed urban youth in the population centres, especially Kampala.
The Costa Foundation helped fund the new PEAS Kigarama school, which comprises of a four-classroom block, administration block and sanitation facilities. The school hosts students from seven feeder primary schools. Like all other PEAS schools, within one year of operation the school had an income-generating activity on site, in this case, likely to be a banana plantation.