Butta Primary School

At the start of KRDP’s involvement, Butta Primary School had around 1000 pupils in seven classrooms built of mud bricks. The children sat on earth floors. One text book was shared between 20 pupils, and there was very little equipment.

With support from KRDP, four new classrooms were built in 2004, with two more in 2006.  All pupils at that time had proper desks. Three projects provided the whole school with sufficient text books for English, Maths, Science and Social Studies to share one between three pupils. We have also provided an office for the head teacher and a staffroom for the teachers.

More recently, our projects have included:

• Connecting the school to the local electricity supply, to provide lighting and power in all classrooms
• Building proper toilet facilities for teachers and pupils

The school has continued to grow and now has over 1300 pupils. Several of the year groups within the school had over 100 pupils which means that teaching was still taking place under difficult circumstances. In 2012 we supported the building of a new classroom block to provide four more classrooms. In 2013-2014 we provided desks and teachers furniture for these new classes. We also provided further textbooks to take account of the extra pupils and also changes in the Uganda National Curriculum. We also were able to provide a reading library in conjunction with the Africa Educational Trust.

A major problem in running the school had long been that all records fore the 1300 pupils were kept on paper. The Head Teacher had often asked if KRDP could help him acquire computer facilities since these would not be available to a rural primary school within the Uganda educational system. In 2015 we were able to obtain a laptop through Computers4Africa and presented this, together with appropriate software, to the school during the Trustees visit that year. A second laptop was provided in 2016.

In 2018 we funded the building of a new school hall.

Toilet facilities are very important in a school and are almost the lowest priority for Government support. The existing facilities were in the form of pit latrines which had fallen into a poor state of repair and, with the growing numbers of pupils, were completely inadequate for the task. We started to think about this in 2020 but the project was put on hold during Covid lockdown. As restrictions eased we returned to this project and Moira Curry, the wife of the KRDP Treasurer, decided she would like to donate the funds to build new latrines. He mother had been a head teacher for many years and was always interested  in the schools we support. Moira asked that the new latrine block be built in her mother’s memory. It led to an interesting discussion about how to provide toilet facilities in a school where boys and girls were present in roughly equal numbers. The initial local proposal was to provide more facilities for boys than girls. Moira agitated for this to be the other way round since the girls would need more extensive washing facilities. In the end, the block was built in this way and was gladly received by the school. In 2024, we carried out  further project to refurbish one of the older toilet blocks. On completion of this problem the school now has facilities for pupils and teachers.