Delta Education Collective
Creating a Viable Pathway to Education
Fast Facts
Uganda
K. Danae Pauli and Jeff Buenrostro
2022-23, 2024, 2025
Education
How Delta Education Collective Is Making a Difference
Delta organizes communities in Uganda to own academic results in existing elementary schools by partnering with parents, students, teachers and community leaders who identify and implement 5 unique goals annually to improve their local public schools’ education outcomes. Popular goals include offering meals at school, providing boarding facilities for older pupils, paying school fees on time, bringing back students who dropped out, hiring more teachers, and many more.
Delta is proving that community-led education reform raises academic performance effectively, Delta plans to offer this approach to primary schools nationwide, and beyond, and looks forward to partnering with the Ministry of Education to pilot constituent-driven policy enhancements that could upgrade the education system nationally.
Work of Delta
- Current serves 36,000 students via Community Coaches and Village Education Volunteers who engage parents, students, teachers, school managers and local leaders to work together to improve educational results.
- Sets school goals, implements action plans to achieve them, mobilizes participation, and sensitizes people on the power of quality education.
- Coaches community members to leverage their often-undervalued experience, insights, wisdom, and resources to design sustainable solutions.
- Demonstrates the power and scalability of Delta’s approach when communities have the tools, structures, and encouragement to better educate their children — evidenced by a 12% increase in national-exam pass rates in the last 2 years, and 1,800 children returning to school after they dropped out.
- Analyzes academic improvement to show program success and influence implementation nationally.
Initiatives Supported by Project Redwood
2022-2023: $30,000 to help pilot Delta’s Village Education Volunteers (VEV) program to train community education workers — in a role akin to that of community health workers — to support 20,000 students.
2024: $40,000 to expand the VEV program, providing modest stipends and bicycles to VEVs as they demonstrated success in their key role for improving academic performance.
2025: $30,000 Impact Grant to support strengthening the organization’s financial management, data management, and operational governance, laying a strong foundation for the growth of Delta’s community-led movement of parents, teachers, pupils, and local leaders working together for “Quality Education By and For All” as Delta expands to a second district and reaches 36,000 students.