Masaka couple give second chance to destitute children

For one to qualify for such an award, they must have engaged in meaningful volunteer service that must have created a measurable transformation in society.

Last year’s Masaka District Community Development award went to Joseph Kaggwa and his wife Jessica Mugambira who were rewarded as leading community change agents.

The story of Ms Mugambira is a life-long journey, told through a series of challenging episodes that have seen the couple transform the lives of hundreds of young people, including sex workers, through introducing them to new life skills programmes.

Through the programmes, the couple has been able to impart employable skills to the disadvantaged who have graduated into job creators.

Their story therefore earned them public admiration because of the hundreds of people whose future they have influenced.

Ms Mugambira trained in hair dressing and cosmetology while Mr Kaggwa, her husband, specialised in the sale of cosmetics, a job he did until he was diagnosed with a rare health condition that struck his spinal cord and eventually paralysed his body from the waist downwards.

The condition has since reduced Mr Kaggwa to a state of permanent physical disability since 2004. Because of his condition, Mr Kaggwa now moves with the help of a wheelchair.
At the time, the couple had established a salon in one of the suburbs of Kampala, which remained the family’s primary source of income.

But they soon realised they could no longer afford a comfortable lifestyle in Kampala due to high expenditure and relocated to Masaka.

“Our decision meant we would leave our customers in Kampala although we were optimistic we would get more clients despite the kind of work we were doing,” Ms Mugambira says.

In Masaka, the family hunted for a modest accommodation in the district’s most dreaded slum of Nyendo; which is known to harbour people of all sorts of bad lifestyles.

Ms Mugambira says their newfound home exposed them to a host of challenges in the community, including prostitution, teenage motherhood, drug abuse and high school dropout rates, which according to her, largely affected the females.

Given her experience in salon business, her unique hairstyles in Masaka gave her a competitive edge over others in similar business.

Since Ms Mugambira had already developed a soft spot for the needy and suffering since childhood, she saw an opportunity to revive the love of her childhood calling.

So when one of her clients approached her to take up a young girl who had been neglected by her parents after she was impregnated while in school, Ms Mugambira seized the opportunity and quickly offered to help.

“This was a girl whose family had disinherited her when she became pregnant before completing Primary Seven. In fact, the woman that brought her was her auntie who dropped her at my workplace before asking me to make basic efforts of introducing her to life skills,’ she says.

More clients shared stories of young girls who the community perceived as hopeless and social outcasts based on their unfortunate backgrounds. Surprisingly, Ms Mugambira opened up opportunities for them to learn from her salon without paying any penny.

Faced with similar requests almost daily, the couple undertook to rehabilitate these destitute girls through counselling and introducing them to basic hair dressing skills.

“Many more were brought in for skills development. We started with only four teenagers, but within two years, we had sent off 28 to the employment world,” Mugambira recalls.

“Since we provide hands-on learning to the children, their skills matched with the growing demand in the job market. Several were employed in different salons across town since they understood better the kind of work required while others opened their own salons,” she added.

Although the couple started off in a double-roomed house in Nyendo, given the growing demand for their services, there was need to expand.

Having empowered several young girls around Nyendo village, the couple then bought land in Kitenga, on the Masaka-Villa Maria Road out of the proceeds from their salon business.

“We later got partners from different civil society organisations that sponsored children to come and get basic knowledge on practical skills in hair dressing and cosmetology. This boosted our business as we constructed classrooms on the piece of land we had acquired,” Mr Kaggwa says.

Their old charity school was soon expanded and a formal component introduced. The training facility was upgraded into one of the dominant vocational institutions and named Mummies’ Institute of Beauty and Commercial Studies.

“At the inception, many of the students were vulnerable and greatly constrained by resources while others were teenage mothers who couldn’t get back to school,” Kaggwa explains.

Later, the Aids Support Organisation (TASO) came on board by getting sex workers off streets and sponsoring them for skills development in the institute. This, according to Mr Kaggwa, boosted the institute’s earnings since it majorly depended on the sales of crafts and salon services.

The institute later attained affiliation from Kyambogo University and a host of other academic institutions that accredited the skills courses taught to their students. Today, the institute teaches up to 14 courses, including Accountancy, Secretarial Studies and Journalism.

“Our main struggle was to change the mentality of communities around us about vocational skills. Many parents perceived it as an area for the failed persons, not until the community started seeing some of our graduates progressing faster than those that had completed formal higher education cycle,’ Mr Kaggwa adds.

The couple has for the last seven years been sponsoring five children with disabilities each academic year to attain life improving skills on top of holding fundraisers to support their businesses after studies. And so far, 3,500 students have benefited under this arrangement while another 1,600 have benefited through the formal courses offered.

A peep into the institutions visitors’ register books indicate that they are now receiving people from outside the districts of Greater Masaka.
But what keeps the fire of ambition burning in the couple is their faith in the conviction that “once you acknowledge challenges, it’s better to confront them.”