By Ndakaitei Makwanise and Octavious Masunda

Note: The authors, graduate students at the Institute of Peace, Leadership and Governance at Africa University, interned with UMECS. This is an abridgement of their report on the launch of the Lira Palwo Counseling and Guidance Program in February and March 2007

In the history of the Northern Uganda conflict, one striking feature is the involvement of children as both perpetrators and victims of war. Another is that most children are affected both directly and indirectly by this conflict. It is against such background that a guidance and counseling programme was launched at Lira Palwo Secondary School in Pader District led by a renowned counselor and registered psychologist, John Mapfumo, director of Africa University’s Counseling Department in the Faculty of Education and Senior Lecturer at the Institute of Peace, Leadership and Governance, assisted by the authors. The following is an attempt to capture the main activities carried out, the results yielded and the way forwards of this pilot programme.

John Mapfumo in a group photo of teachers and staff at Lira Palwo Secondary School following the training of trainers workshops to launch the UMECS-sponsored Counseling and Guidance Program. This pilot program will be further developed and replicated at additional UMECS-partnered schools to serve the counseling and guidance needs of children, youth and families in Northern Uganda.

Why was Lira Palwo Secondary School selected to pilot the Counseling and Guidance Programme? The organization which sponsored the programme, United Movement to End Child Soldiering (UMECS), has a longstanding relationship with Lira Palwo Senior Secondary School. UMECS is sponsoring eleven of their seventy-eight students at the school and collaborated with its principal Mr. Patrick Obonyo, Lira Palwo’s dedicated leader, to launch the programme at Lira Palwo where there are over 500 students, many having been formerly abducted and all being affected by the war. Furthermore, the programme was warmly received by community members and leaders. This programme is an extension of the UMECS vision of helping children impacted by conflict including former child soldiers by providing them with full and holistic support in their education.

The aim of the counseling and guidance programme is to equip the students to cope with the war and post war situation they have been exposed to and to face the challenges of the future through skills and coping mechanisms on how to deal with day to day challenges. It is likened to training a tree to grow as it ought to be.

The first step in launching the programme was the development of a needs assessment form. The form was designed to research and assess the counseling requirements of the students. The assessment was conducted by our programme team together with teachers at the school. Thereafter, a weeklong data analysis was conducted. The results were presented in a two day workshop attended by the teachers and influential members of the community.

The following is a synopsis of the results:

· Many of the students are over-age in their classes which is a result of interruptions due to lack of fees, displacement, and abductions.
· There are more boys than girls in the classes, which can be a result of priority being given to boys and early marriages among girls due to poverty. However the study also revealed that there are more girls who have enrolled for Senior One and generally more students due to the recently introduced Universal Secondary Education. (USE).
· More than three quarters of the students do not have both parents. This means they have lost either one or both of their parents due to war related causes and diseases such as HIV/AIDS.
· Most of the students’ parents and/or guardians are peasant farmers. Since they are mostly displaced, they are without income.
· There were fewer interruptions for students in senior one as compared to those in senior two to four. This may be a result of the fact that at primary level there is Universal Primary Education(USE) but when they came to secondary, they were required to pay fees leading to drop outs.
· Most of the students had their education interrupted due to lack of fees.
· Most of the students passed their PLE with a division two result
· There is an increase in the number of students with division three in Senior One.
· About a fifth of the orphaned girl students are child heads.
· About a tenth of the orphaned boy students are child heads.
· Most of the students indicated that they require school fees support.
· Most of the students have been abused in various ways
· A fifth of the students indicated their health is poor.
· Half of the girls have received some counseling or advice while very few boys indicated that they have received it. This can be due to the fact that more attention is given to girls than boys.
· Very few students have received career guidance.
· Most of the students state they want to be nurses and doctors after finishing school. This is mainly due to lack of career guidance.
· Senior students prefer individual counseling while junior students prefer group counseling.
· Almost all the students belong to one or more clubs.

Training Counselors in Northern Uganda . An entire society has been traumatized by a twenty year war but none worse than children abducted and forced into child soldiering and sex slavery. Here, John Mapfumo conducts a training of trainers workshop at Lira Palwo Secondary School to pilot the UMECS-sponsored Counseling and Guidance Program. The program will be replicated to additional UMECS-partnered schools.

It was decided that counseling services are needed for both the community where children come from and for the students themselves. Many of the problems met by the students are from home, such as students heading households or having parents and guardians with severe problems or family members suffering from their ordeals, which makes it important those community members should have access to counseling services since they are also suffering, and many are traumatized. Given that children, youth and community members have many of the same experiences throughout the north, we believe that if the needs assessment were to be conducted at other schools, the results will show high needs for counseling.

Some relevant additional findings we made is that while there are reception centers for former child soldiers in Northern Uganda, such as Gulu Support the Children Organization (GUSCO) where two students from our group are interning, none of the many students we interviewed at Lira Palwo who had been abducted had gone through a reception center, and most were not familiar with counseling. Many thought of counseling as “advice” but were not familiar with various forms of counseling.

During the programme development, training sessions were conducted and some of the teachers had various counseling backgrounds.

Key way forwards for program development are:

· Return of John Mapfumo, the authors and a UMECS team in June for two months of trainings, continued assessments and program development
· Development of a Guidance component to the programme
· Replication of the programme in additional secondary schools with which UMECS is partnered
· Discussions of Diploma level counseling trainings