Job Skills for Ugandan Girls

The VHC Skills Development Centre provides Ugandan girls with vocational skills including sewing, hairdressing, knitting, jewelry, handbag, and mat making, computing, motor vehicle mechanics, and electrical installation.

Classes run for eight hours in a day at VHC and take place over a period of two years to prepare students for the Directorate of Industrial Training formal examinations.

Your tax-free contribution will be used to expand our electrical installation training class to an interested group of 16 students. We will also purchase teaching materials for the motor vehicle mechanics course including: engines for manual and automatic vehicles, a moving vehicle to work on, and portable tool boxes for the girls’ hands-on practices.

Finally, additional funds raised will be used to complete a new classroom block for our training classes, kitchen, library, an automotive workshop, and administrative offices,  as our current facility is not sufficient for growth.


What Can be Done – Join Our GoFundMe Campaign 

With GoFundMe donations, Voluntary Hearts Community for Girl-child Concern , a registered Non Profit-making Government organization (NGO), will expand it’s vocational training programs that help young women improve their livelihood.  We offer classes in hairdressing, tailoring, auto mechanics, electrical wiring and plumbing.  You can visit our website at: voluntaryheartscommunity.org 

When one girl is educated, a community is educated, because girls empowered with an education will delay marriage, have fewer children, earn a higher income, and are more likely to invest in their communities. When girls gain skills, knowledge and confidence, they break the cycle of poverty strengthening communities and societies.

VHC specifically targets young women in and nearby Kampala, who are orphaned, abandoned, exploited, and live with single parents, parents who are physically handicapped, or with elderly caregivers.

Today, 60  girls participate in the VHC vocational training  program, and VHC must turn away girls due to a lack of resources. The need couldn’t be greater. 

Thank you for your donation!

Success stories:

Five students currently work at a garage, earning money as they learn auto repairs skills in the motor vehicle mechanics course.. They learn how to adjust engines timing, change wheel bearings, replace brake pads, service engine and cooling systems, and conduct basic auto maintenance. These girls have changed community attitudes towards such courses, which people had deemed to be for exclusively males.

Nine girls from our program recently sat for their DIT National exams in June/2018; one of our graduates, Jalia, has been contracted by the area Member of Parliament to train a group of sixty women in hairdressing techniques. In Kibengo, a team of four hairdressing VHC girls (Justine, Janat, Rebecca, and Jalia) were hired to do hairstyles for a wedding, which highly increased their appreciation for the course and improved their confidence. Our community brings clothes for our tailoring students to sew, and local women entrust our hairstyling students with plating, relaxing, dying, styling, their hair.

Mulungi Rebecca, a hairdressing student says,” “I thank God for VHC.  They took me from being a mere house maid to now a hairdresser.  I can now make a better wage – 3,0000 UGX for plaiting hair.”

Impact on the community:

Our vocational training program has greatly contributed to changing the attitudes of people in the community, as well as benefiting the girls by increasing their skill set, self-esteem, and ability to earn a living. The community sees that girls, whom they had previously lost hope in, are positively engaged in work. These girls who were once abused both sexually and physically, victims of early pregnancies and marriages, or who originate from poorest backgrounds, by acquiring new vocational skills, are now contributing members of our community.

Some background about the problem of unemployment for young women in Uganda:

Uganda has the world's largest percentage of young people under 30 – 78% – according to the UN Population Fund.  Youth unemployment in Uganda is the highest in Africa, at 62%, according to a recent study published by ActionAid.  The African Development Bank believes it could be as high as 83%.

Findings from the 2015 School to Work Transition Survey conducted by Uganda Bureau of Statistics and ILO reveal that young women (15-29 years) face a number of disadvantageous gaps in the labor market: higher unemployment rates, wage gaps, higher shares in vulnerable employment and longer school-to-work transitions.

Syda Bbumba, Minister of Gender, Labor and Social Development in the Government of Uganda, and the country’s first woman Minister of Finance, Planning and Economic Development, in an interview with the World Bank, noted,

“In the streets of Kampala, alone we have over two million literate youths without jobs and another two million illiterate youths without jobs.”   

She advocates investing in vocational job training