Category: Uncategorised

Saturday Programme in Naguru Slums, Uganda

In the Naguru slum of Kampala, Uganda, Saturdays often pose particular risks for children: left unsupervised while caretakers work or socialise, many are drawn into unsafe environments such as gambling zones and gangs, or face neglect and abuse at home. Seven Hills Foundation’s Saturday Programme counters this by giving 105 vulnerable children enrolled in our after school programmes a safe, structured environment each week. With typical attendance of 60 to 90 children, our trusted local facilitators, many of them former beneficiaries themselves, deliver four hours of learning, play, and counselling every Saturday, spanning Safe Space sessions, arts and sports, and workshops such as sewing, where children build practical skills.

What began as a six-month grant last year is now a 12-month commitment (July 2026 to June 2027) by Kent Family Foundation to Seven Hills Foundation, giving these children a longer runway of safe, consistent weekly support.

This year’s funding also expands beyond the Saturday sessions themselves, now helping cover two of our local facilitators who run weekday drop-in sessions at our Resource Centre. This means we can reach children and caretakers throughout the week, not just on Saturdays, following up on the trust built during Saturday sessions with practical help on issues like school access, family wellbeing, and safeguarding.

We are very grateful to the Kent Family Foundation for their additional £2,200 grant towards our Working Women Programme.

This support is helping us provide vocational training in beauty therapy, bridal makeup, jewellery making, and tailoring for women from very low-income backgrounds in the north of Sri Lanka, many of whom have little or no other support.So far, 91 women have already started the programme, gaining practical, hands-on skills that can help them find work or start small businesses and earn an income. The project is ongoing and will be completed by the end of this year, continuing to support women towards greater stability and independence

Beyond the classroom: Empowering local communities to champion their children’s education

After 25 years of working alongside communities in Ghana, AfriKids is stepping into a bold new chapter. Thanks to support from the Kent Family Foundation and from across the AfriKids community, the charity is preparing to launch Rise Up, a focused and scalable model that will look beyond the classroom, at the power that lies in a child’s most invested stakeholder – their parents and caregivers

The challenge is urgent. Across Sub-Saharan Africa, 9 in 10 children cannot read by age 10, and in Ghana, children spend more years in school than anywhere in Africa yet gain the equivalent of just six years of learning. With global education budgets shrinking, simply building more classrooms is not enough. Instead of asking, “how can we build more classrooms?”, AfriKids is asking, “how can we build the kind of community that fills those classrooms and supports their children to learn?” 

Launching as a pilot in early 2026, Rise Up will place parents, caregivers and local leaders firmly in the driving seat, strengthening belief in education, increasing learning time at home and in school, and building collective responsibility for children’s success. AfriKids will be testing what truly activates communities, and how change can be sustained and scaled and aims to improve learning outcomes for more than 3,000 children. 

Together, through the power of education, we are tackling the root causes of poverty and enabling communities to lead lasting change for their children’s futures.

Saturday Programme in Naguru Slums, Uganda

We are supporting Seven Hills Foundation’s Saturday Programme, which offers 105 vulnerable children in the Naguru slum of Kampala, Uganda a safe, supportive environment each week. In this community, Saturdays often pose particular risks: children are frequently left unsupervised as caretakers work or engage in social activities, leaving them exposed to unsafe environments. Without structured engagement, many are drawn into harmful areas such as gambling zones or face the risk of joining local gangs. Others remain at home, where domestic abuse and neglect are common.

The Saturday Programme counters this by providing a four-hour weekly session of learning, play, and counselling. With typical attendance of 60 to 90 children, the Programme creates a safe, consistent routine and builds trusted relationships between children and facilitators, many of whom were once beneficiaries themselves and now serve as local role models. This cycle, children will also take part in entrepreneurship skilling workshops focused on sewing, offering both creative expression and practical livelihood skills.

The KFF grant supports the Saturday Programme’s operations from July to December 2025, enabling Seven Hills Foundation to continue delivering real, local-led impact.“

WONDER Foundation supports women and girls across the world with the knowledge, skills, opportunities and networks they need to exit poverty for good, and bring others with them. 

They have partnered with ISSI (The Institut Supérieur en Sciences Infirmières), since 2015, the leading institution for nurse and midwifery training in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). ISSI plays a critical role in addressing the country’s severe shortage of healthcare professionals. With only 4 nurses per 10,000 people, the DRC’s healthcare system is vastly under-resourced, particularly in rural areas, where communities have limited or no access to basic medical care. 

We are supporting a project for ISSI’s nursing and midwifery students to conduct community health camps in four underserved cities—Matadi, Mbuji-Mayi, Kolwezi, and Kikwit. These locations were chosen due to high rates of maternal and neonatal mortality, lack of trained healthcare staff, and widespread preventable diseases. 

Through this project, under supervision the ISSI students will: 

• Provide free healthcare services to 400 people in these cities.
• Train two healthcare providers per location (a total of 8) to improve local healthcare capacity.
• Deliver maternal and neonatal health education to expecting mothers, reducing preventable deaths.
• Deliver hygiene training, which is limited among nursing practice, reducing preventable deaths.
• Gain practical field experience, better preparing them for careers in healthcare and rural service.

The promotion of intensive horticultural production in the Nankhunda locality, near Zomba, Malawi.  It offers the opportunity to increase overall food production on a small-scale farm [i.e. half an acre or less], to provide a more varied diet and thereby raise local nutritional standards, and also to offer new opportunities for commercial sales.

Photos taken in January 2024 show that this was a steep, rocky, and largely wasted space, but when the Nsanama Women’s garden [see above] was visited on 26th November it was flourishing. The garden now contains 10 bananas, 1 pawpaw and 5 Tephrosia vogelii as well as the mango, avocado and citrus – 3 fruits which were planted before the garden was established. The raised beds within the kitchen contained more than 50 tomato plants, rape, 5 gourds and maize. The garden has used space for a tree nursery which contained in November more than 2,000 seedlings for agroforestry planting on members’s farms

Funding for the construction of a KVIP-type toilet block in the Zuarungu-Moshie Junior
High School, in the Upper-East Region of Ghana.

The current pit latrine that serves pupils and teachers has become a death trap due to its dilapidated nature.  Its closeness to the classroom block also creates unbearable stench of smell. The work is to relocate and construct a KVIP-type toilet at a distance away from the classroom block.  It will also involve filling up the old site so that it does not present
health risk to humans and wandering animals.”

We have been pleased to support the Serendip Children’s Home with their Working Women Programme. This support will enable them to continue providing vocational training in Aari work, bridal, and sewing to women from low-income backgrounds in the war-affected regions of Sri Lanka. With this funding, around 250 women will receive hands-on training over the next year, equipping them with skills to start home-based businesses or secure employment, helping them become financially independent during these challenging times.

We are supporting AfriKids’ Community Champions initiative, which is empowering 60 communities in northern Ghana to drive lasting change for the next generation. By the end of 2026, 37,300 children will experience improved learning outcomes thanks to this collective effort. The initiative is fully led by local people who are best placed to understand and address the needs of their communities. AfriKids works with parents, teachers, and leaders to ensure that every child completes a quality basic education. Together, we are building a movement that proves the power and potential of local communities to create real change for their children.

Humanists UK campaigns to legalise assisted dying for adults of sound mind who are intolerably suffering from an incurable, physical condition and have a clear and settled wish to die. This grant will fund two core projects between June and October 2024: 1) Finding and interviewing people who people have been affected by the current law on assisted dying, using their stories to raise the profile of the campaign 2) Developing a detailed policy proposal that can be used to inform and assist in the future drafting of an assisted dying bill.