Civil Society has published a new podcast episode with Olivia Barker White, chief executive and co-founder of Kids Club Kampala.
In this episode, Barker White discusses the challenges of running a small NGO, her advocacy work for other small charities, and the effects of the recent foreign aid cuts on charities like hers.
You can listen to the interview now below or on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music and Pocket Casts.
AI-generated transcript
Emily Moss (EM): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Civil Society Podcast. I'm Civil Society’s junior reporter, Emily Moss, and on today’s show, I’ll be speaking with Olivia Barker White, the founder of Kids Club Kampala, a UK- and Uganda-based children’s NGO which she helped to set up when she was just 19. Kids Club Kampala do incredible work working with children, young people and their families to offer child protection, family strengthening and education programmes in deprived areas of Kampala, Uganda’s capital city; they also work across Uganda. Since the charity was first set up in 2007 by Olivia and her Ugandan colleagues, it’s reached 1.56 million people, delivered 45 million meals to hungry children and families, and given free education to 1890 children. However, Kids Club Kampala remains a small charity – and running a small charity is not without its challenges. To help support other small charities, Olivia has more recently served as a member of NCVO’s Small Charities Advisory Panel since 2023, and volunteers as a trustee and working group member of the Small International Development Charities Network. We discuss her journey with setting up Kids Club Kampala and the challenges of founding a charity at such a young age, as well as the difficulties of running small charities and of running an NGO in the face of the recent UK and US foreign aid cuts. I hope you find this conversation with Olivia interesting and useful, and I'll speak to you again at the end.
EM: I'm sure you've been asked this a lot but did you always intend to work in the charity sector? 'Cause I noticed you studied development at uni and so I was just wondering, was this always what you intended to do or did you envisage working in a different area of development?
Olivia Barker White (OBW): Yeah, to be honest, I didn't really know when I… ever since I was really young, I was always interested in the world and I loved geography at school. I did a lot of volunteering in my spare time as a teenager. So I went to university to study international development, partly because at school I really enjoyed geography and economics and it was quite a nice crossover. I always wanted to do something practical… I didn't really want to… I always wanted to do something that would make a difference, but that was fairly practical. And when I finished university, I started working in the international development sector, but within management consultancy in the private sector and I just found that didn't really suit me. It didn't… it just felt quite far removed from the actual cause. So I was there for a while, but that wasn't really where my passions lay. It was obviously… development's a hugely broad spectrum. And so I think I always wanted to do something that was yeah, more practical, more actually on the ground, grassroots type work.
EM: Yeah. Yeah. And so I suppose, I do have quite a few questions, but I'll try and combine them into one about Kids Club Kampala, because obviously, it’s in Uganda, it’s for children in Uganda. It’s all quite niche. And it’s in Kampala specifically. So was there like a particular moment or experience that inspired you to set up this charity? Did you go and visit Uganda… what was the sort of watershed moment, I suppose?
OBW: Yeah. So yeah I went to visit Uganda… so when I finished school before I went to university, actually I did a gap year. And [as] part of that I did overseas volunteering. And the organisation that I did that with sent me to Uganda. So I didn't know anything about that country. I'd never left Europe before. And I went. And I spent the best part of the year living in Uganda, the organisation that I was sent there with placed myself and a bunch of other young people from the UK in a secondary school to teach English. And in Uganda, school's not free. So if you are a child who is at secondary school, this is a boarding school as well. If you're at a secondary boarding school, you are very elite. And I was an 18-year-old just finished school. I had no teaching experience. And in Uganda, the education system is taught in English. So if you are a student from a wealthy family who's at a secondary boarding school, your English is probably better than my English. So I was not qualified to teach and I was not needed in any way, and I'd spent a whole lot of money, fundraised a lot of money to do this gap year. And I really… I was very naive and I really wanted to do something to help and I just felt very frustrated because I was at this school and there's wonderful people, [I] made some lovely friends, but I didn't feel like I was actually being useful or helpful in any way and -- there's a whole other conversation around is international volunteering ever helpful – but I feel like that's a whole other can of worms to get into. But anyway, a very long story short, I met some incredible Ugandan friends. And one friend in particular whom I met, shared his story with me about growing up in really desperate poverty. And his passion and his vision was for children growing up in extreme poverty-- particularly within the slum communities in Kampala, which he had experience of -- for these children to just not feel unwanted and to not feel uncared for or unloved. And so some of my really good friends that I'd made there invited me into the slum communities in Kampala to see what they were doing. I'd expressed my frustration that, ‘oh, I'm not really doing anything. I want it to be useful’. And they were like, ‘well, we are doing this thing. Would you wanna come and see what we're doing?’ And I'd been in Uganda for a little while and I'd obviously seen poverty, but stepping into Kampala slums for the first time was just really, really moving, really heartbreaking. Seeing conditions that young children and families were living in, just seeing abject poverty… but just seeing the incredible work that some of my Ugandan friends were doing. They literally had nothing but they were going into these communities, playing games with the children and just being a safe space, a safe adult looking after these children. And the vision at the beginning was very much just giving children a safe place to play and have fun away from the stresses and worries of their everyday lives. That was it really. And they were calling them kids clubs 'cause they were going in running these clubs for children. And a lot of these kids at a really young age, they were working, whether that's formally or informally, they were doing lots of domestic work in the home, looking after younger brothers or sisters or even picking through rubbish tips, looking for food or even worse, begging or even sex work. And so lots of these children… it was just respite, that's all it was. Just playing games and having fun, on a very small scale. And I was in Uganda for a number of months. I had a lot of spare time and I just fell in love with this and joined in with what they were doing. It was very much my amazing Ugandan friends' vision, and Sam, who was the first guy who introduced me to these communities, he’s now our Ugandan country director and heads up our incredible team there. I then came back to the UK and I went to university. As I said, I studied international development and one thing about being a student is you’ve got a lot of spare time. So, in my spare time, I just started doing some fundraising in a very small way, getting some friends together and doing bits and pieces. And after my first year of uni, I got a group of friends together and we went back to Uganda with no plan, just to kind of join in with what had been happening and. And, if anything, I saw… I found that the conditions in the slums had got worse. I remember there was… we were running a big children's activity doing some games with the big parachutes and there was a bunch of kids sitting on the side of the field, not joining in. And I went over and I said to the children, ‘why aren't you joining in? Are you bored?’ And this is me with my Western lens. ‘Be bored.’ And they just said, ‘oh, we haven't eaten for several days. We don't have the energy to stand up and play and join in’. And it was just there, that really struck me-- there's so much more that needs to be done here. There's so much more need. Yes, it's wonderful that these children are playing some games and having a bit of fun and a break from all the stress, but actually there's so much more that needs to be done. And I went back to UK and started doing some more fundraising, and then it got to a point where, okay, actually this is really taking off in Uganda. We'd had lots of other people who lived in different communities coming to us and saying, ‘oh, I love what you're doing. Can we set up a kids’ club in my community?’ And so suddenly it was snowballing there. So we registered as an NGO in Uganda and then we registered as a charity in the UK as well. And I just started getting friends together and fundraising in my spare time. And then my wonderful friends in Uganda continued doing the work there. And yeah, one thing led to another.
EM: It's an absolutely amazing origin story. Is that… and so is that why you list yourself as a co-founder? ‘Cause I assume you co-founded it with your Ugandan friends then.
OBW: Yeah. Yeah that's exactly right.
EM: Yeah. Really amazing origin story that! So, obviously you were quite young when you set it up. How old were you exactly in your early twenties or 19?
OBW: 19.
EM: … and obviously that's… I mean there are very few people that set up charities at that age. Do you feel like your experience of co-founding it was influenced by your age? Do you feel like you were treated any differently when trying to secure funding, things like that?
OBW: Oh, completely. I was a 19-year-old little white girl. I didn't have any clue about anything. And actually one of the reasons why we started the charity in the first place is because at the beginning I spent quite a lot of time reaching out to other organisations who I knew that were working in Uganda, or who I knew that were, probably quite naively, but just other NGOs that I knew of, and saying, ‘there's this community of children and they're really struggling and there's no other charities, there's no local NGOs here. Can you come and help?’ And I didn't get any response at all. If I'd been an old white male, I'm sure I would've got a response. And just yeah, being taken seriously for a very long time, I found was… difficult. But I think that just builds resilience. And I think I think in my head, I still think of myself as a young person. I'm very much not anymore, but I think it's always led us to be quite innovative and quite resilient and agile in how we fundraise and how we run our programs. Because also my friends in Uganda that we co-founded the charity with, they were a similar age, early twenties. So I think we all faced this at the beginning, but it… working with children and young people, it felt it meant we were at ease and able to probably relate better but also able to be pretty flexible in how we operated as well, and we tried to be quite innovative, I'd like to think,
EM: Yeah, 'cause if you've been in like your forties or whatever, I feel like the dynamic would've switched up completely, been a lot more parental and, yeah.
OBW: No that's very true. Yeah. And in terms of what was I gonna say?
EM: This wasn't a prepared question, but I was gonna say like in, in terms of like the money that you started the charity with, was that mainly sourced from the UK? Or was that sourced from Uganda?
OBW: Yes. It was mainly from the UK, but I said, when… I think our first year of operation, I think our annual turnover was like a thousand pounds. Like it was literally nothing. It was just me harassing all my friends and family and, doing some random club night at uni to raise it. We didn't really, and still don't really, raise very much money within Uganda. The majority of our staff and our volunteers and our supporters in Uganda are people from the local communities that we work in. And that's something we're really proud of. So people aren't necessarily wealthy in that way, but what we have a huge wealth of and certainly had a huge wealth of at the beginning, was people giving their time. And we just suddenly had this sort of army of volunteers in Uganda of all local people from local communities really wanting to help where they lived, which is just incredible.
EM: Yeah. It's absolutely amazing. Do you go back regularly then? I imagine so.
OBW: Yes, so I try to get out there about once a year. I've got three little ones now, so it's just juggling that. But yeah, and some of our team come over here as well but with Zoom and… technology is fantastic, isn't it-- so, we are in constant contact.
EM: Yeah. Amazing. Yeah. And do you… but do you find it challenging running a charity that's mostly based in Uganda from the UK?
OBW: I don't think so, no, because we… I think we are very clear on who's responsible for what. So, as I said, we're in very close communication with our team on the ground. But our team, the Kids Club Kampala in Uganda, is a registered NGO in Uganda. They have their own boards, own management team. And I'm certainly not involved in things like the governance side of things, apart from just general due diligence. I'm not involved with sort of HR decisions or even program, budget decisions. I'm obviously involved with strategy and, in those high-level conversations. But in terms of the day to day, I'm not micromanaging. We’ve got a fantastic team who just do incredible work. And obviously, we do monitoring and evaluation, making sure that we are actually achieving impact and we very much really are. But our team are very autonomous in what they do and how the programs run. And I think that's a real strength of ours that I'm not sitting here in the UK thinking of ideas for projects or telling people how to do their jobs. They know better than me. I'm just yeah, trying to fundraise really. I'm leading our UK team in and the primary purpose of the UK organisation is fundraising and awareness raising as well.
EM: Yeah, no, that's amazing. That's really interesting to hear 'cause I'm always curious with these kinds of charities that are operating in multiple countries, especially well, smaller ones, namely because yeah, it's got less staff to smooth the operation out the same way.
OBW: Yeah, and I think one thing I'm quite passionate about as well is organisations doing development well. I'm also-- in my limited spare time-- but I'm a trustee of the Small International Development Charities Network and it's a great network of different organisations working internationally, predominantly in small charities. And one thing that as an organisation we have a commitment to is encouraging better development. And actually, if you are a UK charity running stuff and micromanaging stuff and being really directed as to what happens in… on the ground overseas, I'd probably gently challenge that, allow your teams to have more power and to have more autonomy around decision making and that kind of thing. Because actually, people know what's best for their communities and for their countries. And I'm just here to, hopefully just rechannel some of the resources from the West to the Global South.
EM: Yeah, definitely. I imagine, I can't remember what I was about to say, I can't imagine, but I can't imagine how much the mindset must have changed around international development in the last… since you founded the charity, like in the last even five years. I feel like there's just been such a huge shift in attitudes to development work. That must be quite complex to navigate, I suppose with like lots of different generations and things like that.
OBW: Yeah definitely. And it is interesting 'cause I think I've seen a lot of different perspectives on that. As I said, I started out working in social development in the more private sector. I founded Kids Club Kampala when I was 19, but I didn't actually begin doing this as my full-time job until a few years later than that. And I only became chief exec in 2019. But I think, yeah, I've had a whole range of different perspectives on development in that time.
EM: Yeah, definitely. And you say you've… so you moved from like that role of co-founder and then you moved into I think a trustee role, am I correct? And then you were a director and then eventually CEO. How come you didn't immediately… not immediately, I suppose you were at university and things, but sort of transition to CEO-- what motivated that decision?
OBW: Partly, the charity had no money to pay any staff. But also I don't I think I hadn't… I don't think I'd quite realised that this could become a job or a career. It was very much this small project that I'd helped found. And I don't think I necessarily believed in myself or believed that it could become what it is today. And so I was… yeah, focused on obviously supporting the charity in my spare time. And then I was working part-time and but I don't think, I don't think I'd seriously really considered that. I was helping the organisation obviously for a very long time in a voluntary capacity. And then when the opportunity came up to become a director, I did. And then when my co-director stepped down, I was asked to be CEO in 2019, and the charity was very different then. It was a very different time, and it was only five, six years ago. Lots changed in that time.
EM: Yeah. I imagine the pandemic probably changed quite a lot.
OBW: Yeah, definitely. Yeah. It really did. It's interesting actually, 'cause I was reflecting on this as I said, I became chief exec in 2019-- at the end of 2019. And it was really difficult. It was a really difficult time. My co-director had stepped down and in the space of a month, we were such a small team. We were a very small fundraising team. There were just four people in the UK and in the space of a month, my ad administrator left and my fundraiser left. And because again, I didn't really know what I was doing, we didn't have proper contracts in place, so people didn't, basically didn't have any notice periods, so they just left. And then one of my trustees, who was a really great and helpful trustee, stepped down as well, all within the space of a few weeks.
And I remember just having this moment where I was like, ‘I can't do it anymore. It's too hard. I do not wanna do this anymore. It's too hard. It's too stressful.’ And it just felt like the end of the world. And amazingly we managed to turn things around. I had a fantastic volunteer interning with me at the time. He stepped in and into a supportive care role. And he's incredible. He's actually now our head of operations. He's just amazing. And we brought in some freelancers and some consultants and, we made it work. But this was the end of 2019, so it was only a couple of months later that the pandemic hit. But I feel that if I hadn't had such a challenging time a few months earlier, I probably wouldn't have survived COVID, but when COVID hit, I was like, ‘I feel like the worst thing's already happened’. I've already had a really stressful time. We managed to come through that. So what's COVID? What's another challenge? It really helped build my resilience too, to get through that and obviously navigating, closing our office and everyone working from home. And navigating all of that with COVID is obviously really challenging. But I actually feel like for us as a charity, COVID was really quite a pivotal moment in terms of our impact, which was amazing really. And again, I think this is why I really do believe in locally led development and grassroots organisations. Because in the UK we were working from home, we obviously couldn't travel and so many large organisations were just pulling all of their staff out of the country. We didn't have any international staff overseas, and so we didn't have that problem, but we had-- pretty quickly in 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic-- we found out that within the slum communities in Kampala, where we were working in the first two or three months of the pandemic, more people had actually passed away from starvation than they had from COVID, which is just absolutely terrible, and yeah so devastating. But one of our real strengths is that we are a community-based, community-led grassroots organisation. And we have such fantastic relationships with local community leaders that we are all really seen as like a pillar of the community. So many of the communities that we work in don't even realise that we even have a UK office. We're seen as this locally led organisation. So when this happened, community leaders came to us and said, ‘what can you do to help?’ And we managed to get a special dispensation from the Ugandan government, which is pretty rare. We do lots of things, but we have big classrooms within the slum communities. We provide free early years education. We have big vocational training centres, so we provide tertiary education. We have our kids’ clubs with large groups of children coming together. So obviously none of that could happen. But we had these empty buildings and we got special permission from the government to turn these empty buildings into food banks, and we started feeding people. And we literally gave out tens of thousands of meals. And it's not an exaggeration to say literally saving people's lives through providing food through these food banks. And we were then asked to expand our work into other communities to continue doing this all throughout the pandemic. Schools, et cetera, were closed. And I think that really cemented our reputation, certainly with local and national government in Uganda, but also it really spoke to our supporters in the UK as well, and we actually managed to raise a huge amount of money, way more than we expected to, to support this emergency response. So yes, COVID was obviously a very devastating time, but I think for us as a charity, it kind of really solidified, ‘okay. This is why we're here and in a time of crisis, we can be really valuable.’
EM: Wow. Yeah, that's a really interesting perspective. I suppose that makes quite a bit of sense, but I've not really heard that from a charity, 'cause I suppose from a domestic perspective it was obviously mostly quite disastrous in a lot of ways for charities. But yeah, that's really interesting. So I moving on from that area… I was just interested about how… obviously you run a small charity, you set up a small charity, but what made you want to then get involved in more advisory capacities, getting on the Small Charities Advisory Panel, the Small International Development Charities Network-- what made you wanna take on those roles later on?
OBW: I think it, to be honest, I think it was just… partly I was getting a lot of people getting in touch with me and asking for advice and help and it was how can I do that in a more formal capacity? But also, I think it was just recognising that actually when I set up Kids Club Kampala, and this was in 2009, so you know, it was a long time ago when I set up Kids Club Kampala, I didn't have any idea of where to turn to for support. I literally had no clue. And it was really hard and I was just thinking, if I could have had some support, what would that have looked like? And then when opportunities came along, I felt, ‘oh, actually, yes, that's something that would've been great to have been a part of, or to have been able to have that support.’ So I'm quite passionate about supporting other small organisations that are looking to scale or supporting other founders looking to either grow their organisation or just for advice and support recognising it's something that I didn't necessarily have, but would've been really useful. And also I'm just quite passionate about just being part of the wider conversation within the sector, within the international development space, but also just within the third sector. I’m interested in just being part of the wider conversation and advocating on behalf of the charity sector in general, but small charities in particular.
EM: Yeah, I was just curious 'cause obviously not everyone goes on to then take these types of roles if they've set up like a small charity so I was just really curious to know. So it's been a very challenging time, to say the leas,t for small charities and also foreign international development charities. I actually saw your LinkedIn post on this subject area, so I almost didn't wanna ask the question 'cause I feel like you, you summarised it very concisely in the LinkedIn post, but obviously I'm sure the recent foreign aid cuts news has been really unwelcome, so how is your charity planning to navigate it going forward?
OBW: Oh. It's just absolutely terrible. Just absolutely terrible. It's really disappointing. From a Labour government, I would never have expected it. The USAID cuts have been absolutely devastating. But I think for then, our government to just follow suit and not try and plug that gap, I think is atrocious. But yes. I think for us… so we haven't been directly financially affected and the majority of international organisations I speak to haven't been directly affected by this round of cuts when the first round of cuts came in 2021. So when the budget was cut from 9.7 to 9.5, we lost quite a significant amount of funding. We were told that we were going to be getting a… we had UK funding previously, and it had been very well… programs had been very well received. And then we had been told that we were getting another grant of 150,000 and when those cuts happened, that disappeared. Luckily, we hadn't started that program. I know lots of other small international development charities who were halfway through programs and suddenly funding was pulled. So that has been absolutely devastating. This time around I haven't, that hasn't been happening because to be honest, this 0.5% hasn't even been achieved. That target… so slashing that target from nor 0.5 to nor 0.3 hasn't made a huge amount of difference, but also a large amount of that funding was being spent on refugees in the UK. So there actually wasn't a lot of direct cuts impacting international development charities, particularly smaller ones. However, what we are seeing now is all of these knock-on effects, which are absolutely devastating, particularly the USAID cuts. For example, in Uganda where we work and actually we've also just recently merged with another charity called the Mango Tree. Now you have programs in Uganda, but also in Kenya and Tanzania, so we are seeing it in Kenya particularly as well. But in East Africa, for example, the majority of healthcare systems and healthcare budgets are funded directly by USAID. Oh wow. So USAID pulling out of these countries is seeing clinics closing. It's seeing family planning services closing. It's seeing anti-HIV drugs disappearing off the market. It's seeing vaccination programs close. It is absolutely devastating. And the knock-on effects of this are other NGOs working on the ground are trying to pick up these pieces. So for example, there's children who we support and we've supported for a number of years who were HIV positive and we support them maybe through their education or we support them. We have a big program that rescues children and that helps them get into safe families. And so we maybe support them in these ways, but we've never had to worry about the medication because that's been covered. Whereas now that has changed. So there's all these additional demands and as some charities are closing as a result of this. And it just means that the demand for, yeah, the demand for programs is really increasing. So as the cuts are happening, it's these other charities, often smaller charities who are on the front line, the grassroots, they're resilient, they're agile, and they're reactive. Often, these are the ones who are trying to pick up those pieces. On the other side of that, we are finding that as this funding is being cut, the larger NGOs who would often rely on large contracts of funding from UK aid or USAID or others no longer have that funding. So they are now directly competing with smaller organisations for funding from other sources, whether that's trusts and foundations or from the general public or from other means. So it actually means that it's a lot harder for these smaller international development charities to access funding as these larger ones who've had cuts other than dipping in the same pool. And then on top of that, we are just seeing other costs increase unnecessarily. So another thing that I've had a little rant about, but with… Microsoft always did for years, has done free licenses for charity, free Microsoft licenses, and they suddenly decided they're not gonna do that. So it's on top of that. We've got other companies and organised suppliers increasing their costs or cutting their charity support. And it's honestly, it just feels at the moment, like a perfect storm. And it's really quite worrying what's happening at the moment. Very hostile to what work you're trying to do.
EM: So do you… but do you have I suppose you have a lot of how, what would you… what's it called? Like, I've forgotten the word now, but planning for contingency plan, contingency plans in place for things like this?
OBW: Yeah, we do. But it is just difficult because there's obviously, there's just… we do have contingency plans, but there's also, as I said, it's really difficult when we are seeing a huge increase in demand for our work. And there's more people coming to us and more people asking us to do more. So it's really hard when, you can have a budgetary contingency plan, but then over here you've got a huge increase in demand. So how to navigate that is, is challenging. This increase in demand is, being seen worldwide, it’s not, 'cause obviously UK charities talk about it all the time and about increased demand versus reduced funding. But it's just happening everywhere.
EM: It's just, yeah, definitely… a perfect storm. So I suppose more, more optimistically. I was about to ask you about the current government's sort of recent policies towards smaller charities after a year in power and how you felt about that. But I don't know, I feel like I already got an impression of maybe your opinions based on what you were just saying. And I feel like everyone says more or less the same thing. There's a general consensus of not massively popular, but yeah. Do you… I don't know, do you have any, do you have any optimism left for the next couple of years?
OBW: That's a difficult question, isn't it? Yeah. I like to think so. I like to think so. I feel like, if you… I like to think I'm quite an optimistic person, but I also feel that if you lose your optimism and if you lose hope, you just give into despair and then what's the point of doing anything? So it's trying to look for the hope where we can. For Kids Club Kampala we are really blessed that we have a wonderful community of supporters. We have a wonderful community of donors who give regularly and some people have given regularly for 10, 15 years, five pounds a month or whatever. But it really makes such a difference and it's been actually lovely. When some of the cuts were introduced to some of our supporters just getting in touch, just saying, ‘I hope you're okay’. So that's been really nice and I think there's definitely a… I've seen a huge amount of solidarity within the sector as well, which I think is again, a cause for optimism. So we've actually recently just merged with another charity called The Mango Tree, who have been doing fantastic work in East Africa for the last 20 years. We've just merged with them, or they've become part of Kids Kampala. And I do think that quite a lot of charities are lucky with how they can better collaborate and better work together and share learnings and share programming and things. So I think that's a cause for optimism as well. There's some. For all that the media tells us of what comes out from the government, I do feel like most people do care. And most people genuinely do want the world to be a better place and a fairer place and a more equitable place. So yeah, I think you have to hold onto hope where you can.
EM: Yeah, definitely. No, I really like that message. I think you're right. I think especially about the inter-sector solidarity is very prominent. I would say I've noticed that a lot [when] reporting. But I think that's what keeps you going at the end of the day. Looking to the future then, what are… do you have any plans in the next… of course you'll have plans, but what are your plans in the next year or so for the charity? And do you have any plans for your advisory roles? Do you plan on taking on anymore or do you have any goals you'd like to achieve with those?
OBW: Yeah, so firstly with Kids Club Kampala, so we yeah, we've got, we've actually just produced our sort of next sort of five-year strategic plan and strategic vision. And we've got very ambitious plans of what we want to do. So I feel like our name is slightly misleading, so we are potentially considering changing our name. But we, yeah… so we don't just work in Kampala. We predominantly work in Kampala. But increasingly our work is taking us nationwide across Uganda. So a huge part of what we do, a huge area of our work now is around child protection. And we do lots of community safeguarding. We work very closely with local services within Uganda to help safeguard children. We provide a sort of family mediation and counselling, family poverty alleviation programs, but also where needed we support with removing children from unsafe families or working with children who've been abandoned, or maybe the families become homeless or there's been a mental health crisis and we intervene and provide safe spaces, respite, shelter and then long-term support. And a lot of the… we help to rescue children and quite a lot of the children we rescue are in Kampala, but the reason they're in Kampala is often they've been trafficked to Kampala. Or they've got lost and ended up in Kampala or, yeah, there's been some sort of crisis and increasingly we're working on resettling children back with family members in far-reaching places throughout Uganda, we've even resettled them in Rwanda. And we have been asked by the local authorities in Uganda to scale up our current work to reach more districts throughout the country, basically. We already have presences in different communities where we're supporting children, but we’re looking to do something more formal, obviously when funding allows, but our kind of aim is within the next five years, obviously funding dependent, is looking at where can we help support other communities in need in Uganda and so how can we support, rather than just rescuing children who've been trafficked to Kampal and taking them back to the communities, how can we support these communities to reduce poverty and to build up resilience so that, that instance doesn't happen? And looking at expanding our model of providing educational centres, providing vocational training, providing community safeguarding. We've got this fantastic model. Completely grassroots, run by local community volunteers. How can we replicate that across other communities and also throughout Kenya and Tanzania as well, now that we have program delivery partners there as well? So we've got quite ambitious plans to do that which is really exciting. It's just all funding dependent as everything is. And then for me personally so obviously it’ my passion. But I am… yeah, also really, as I said, really keen to support the sector in other ways. I do a little bit of freelance work supporting other organisations, organisational development and strategy stuff. And yeah, helping to just strengthen and advocate for the sector in general. So yeah, I'm keen to do more of that work as well.
EM: Thank you for listening to my chat with Olivia. Please like and subscribe to the Civil Society podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Look out for another episode in the coming weeks, and in the meantime, I hope you stay safe and well.
