HuSA refugee school. Sharing water, health, and dignity

There is a school in Kyangwali Refugee Settlement that needs our help. Not just a school, but one that focuses on children raised by single parents  or those housed through elderly care. Humanitarian Services Action School (HuSA) is located in a resource poor area of this Ugandan refugee settlement, we know, we’ve been there. Most of the Congolese refugees live without necessities such as water or reliable meals. HuSA is trying to help 197 of these desperate students with basic human rights such as safe water, health, clothing, and education. 

HuSA is requesting our help to support and supply the school with safe water, a mosquito net and basic uniforms for each child, and secure windows and doors for the school building. Each one of these items is paramount for a healthy and successful school, and the details are attached at our donation page. 

“The school began with what the founder saw during community outreach. Sumi Hamid found children left alone at home for the whole day, enrolled nowhere, cared for by no adult, and going without breakfast or lunch. The streets of the settlement held children of the same age in the same condition. He decided he could not walk past it.” 

You don’t have to walk past this either. With your kind contribution, we can provide these students what we all deserve, health, hygiene, safe water, dignity, and a chance for a productive future. Thank you.  

* If we are blessed to meet our campaign goal, the additional funds will be used to build a classroom and to sponsor the staff. Thank you.

HuSA Model Nursery and Primary School

Four urgent needs, one school

HuSA Foundation for Systemic Transformation. Operating name: HuSA. Registered Community Based Organisation No. CD/WG/3700/26, Kikuube District Local Government.

Why this school exists

The school began with what the founder saw during community outreach. Sumi Hamid found children left alone at home for the whole day, enrolled nowhere, cared for by no adult, and going without breakfast or lunch. The streets of the settlement held children of the same age in the same condition. He decided he could not walk past it.

The response was direct. Bring those children into one space that could give them what the day at home did not: protection, a meal, early childhood development, psychosocial support, and the chance to play. That space became the first HuSA classroom. Demand arrived faster than one person could carry, and that pressure is what pushed him to mobilise the wider community behind it.

The move from early childhood into primary level came from a harder discovery. Government and community leaders helped identify 97 children in the settlement who were of primary school age and were in no school at all. They were in the garden, hawking goods at the roadside, or doing whatever labour the household needed to get through the day. Years of that had already caught up with many of them. They could not read or understand text written for their age, and for some the gap had closed over permanently. A number of them left the pathway back to school entirely and carried forward the same poverty that had pulled them out of the classroom.

That is why the HuSA model treats enrolment itself as a protection intervention, and why the household layer of the model exists. A child who is out of school in Kyangwali is rarely idle. They are usually already working.

The need has grown faster than the funding. In a single year enrolment rose from 59 to 167 children, with a further 30 reached through community sport for protection. The school now runs Baby Class through Primary 4. It was built one urgent decision at a time, and it still is.

Every child given priority for a place lives with a single parent, an elderly caregiver, or a parent living with a disability. Today 47% of families choose to enrol and pay fees themselves, at UGX 55,000, about USD 15, a term. That is trust the school did not expect to earn this early. No child is ever sent home for unpaid fees. Holding that promise is what makes these four campaigns necessary.

The context: why Zone E, why now

Every morning in Zone E a household chooses between the garden and the classroom, because it can spare the child for one of them, and the family’s food for the week depends on which it picks. The child does not make that choice.

Kyangwali was originally settled for Rwandan refugees and stood largely empty for a period after they left. It reopened in 1997, when conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo sent a new wave into Uganda. For more than two decades after that the population held steady at around 47,000. In November 2018 a further wave arrived from Ituri Province, and within a single year the settlement grew to roughly 127,000. It has since passed 150,000. Most of that later influx, overwhelmingly Congolese women and children, settled in Zone E, where the HuSA school now stands.

Women and children make up 81% of the settlement population.

A community shaped that way carries a protection problem alongside its school problem, and a school only answers it if the school is built to answer it. That is why HuSA does not enrol on a first come basis. Children are prioritised against three profiles: those raised by elderly caregivers, those in single parent households, and those in two parent households where poverty alone has made consistent protection impossible.

The target is 500 children enrolled by 2031. Counted properly, that is 500 mornings that begin in a classroom instead of a garden or a roadside.

The four needs below sit inside that same system. Water, nets, doors and uniforms are conditions the protection model depends on to work at all.

Campaign 1: Safe water for 197 children

Goal: USD 3,470

Right now this school filters swamp and rainwater to keep children alive. Help make it a pipeline.

Nobody planned for a water crisis. The school started as a room for toddlers, not a facility that needed infrastructure. As enrolment grew, so did the daily need to cook and to give children safe water. A Ripple International already stepped in once, with a filtration system that turns collected swamp water and harvested rain into something safe to drink. It has kept children alive. It does not keep them fed every day.

The current supply fails often enough that on some days the school cannot cook for the children in its care. A tap connection into a proper reservoir tank turns an emergency workaround into a system that holds.

- A pipeline tap connection to the settlement water source.

- A reservoir tank to store and supply water reliably.

- Dependable water for cooking and drinking every day, for 197 children.

Any amount moves this forward. USD 50 covers a share of the tank materials. USD 3,470 finishes the job.

Campaign 2: A uniform and a pair of shoes for every child

Goal: USD 3,830

197 children. Two sets of uniform and a pair of shoes each. That is the whole ask.

Nearly half the families at HuSA now choose the school themselves and pay what they can toward it. Families who can pay send their children in uniform, and the difference shows. A child dressed like every other child in the class carries themselves differently. Most families here cannot afford it, and the HuSA policy is firm: no child goes home for what their household cannot pay. That policy protects a child. It does not clothe them.

This is the most direct and most visible way to support a child at HuSA. There is no ambiguity about what the money buys or who receives it.

- Two full uniform sets for each of 197 children.

- One pair of school shoes for each of 197 children.

- A consistent, dignified start to the day for every child, whatever their household can pay.

USD 20 outfits one child completely. USD 3,830 outfits the whole school.

Campaign 3: Mosquito nets

Goal: USD 1,752

A child who spends the term sick with malaria loses the term. Help us stop it before it starts.

Malaria is the most common reason a child at HuSA misses school for days at a time, and repeated absence is how a child slips from behind into out of school altogether. In Zone E, households that arrived most recently are the least likely to have a net that is intact and hung.

This campaign sits at the centre of what A Ripple International funds. It is health provision that protects attendance, and attendance is what the whole HuSA model depends on.

- Long lasting insecticidal nets for the children the school serves.

- Distribution recorded against the enrolment register, so every net is accounted for to a named child and household.

- A short household session on hanging and using the net, delivered on the teaching assistant visit round at no additional cost.

Every net is delivered to a named household on the visit round HuSA already runs. USD 1,752 covers the full distribution.

Campaign 4: Doors and windows

Goal: USD 1,120

The school has no fence. At night, broken doors turn empty classrooms into somebody else’s toilet. Help us lock them.

The HuSA compound is not fenced, and the community around it holds over 26,000 school going children, most with nowhere secure to go once the sun sets. Four of the classrooms were previously used under a programme run by an international partner organisation that has since closed. When that programme ended, the rooms sat unused long enough for every door and window to be damaged or removed.

Each classroom was built with two doors, one at the front into the room and one at the back. With no fence around the compound and no working doors or windows on these four rooms, the classrooms stand open to anyone in the surrounding community once school closes, overnight, and across the weekend. Children from the wider community, not HuSA learners, use the empty rooms as a toilet when nothing else is available to them.

Every school day begins the same way. Before HuSA children can be taught in these rooms, staff clean human waste out of the classroom left there overnight or over the weekend.

This is a health and dignity problem affecting children who already carry more than children their age should have to. It is also the least expensive problem in this package to solve completely.

- Repair or replacement of 8 classroom doors across 4 rooms, fitted to lock securely.

- Repair or replacement of 16 windows across the same 4 rooms.

- Classrooms that stay secured outside school hours and are clean and ready every morning.

- Full use of 4 rooms HuSA has needed since 2025 and has never been able to occupy safely.

USD 280 repairs one full classroom. USD 1,120 fixes all four.