Bright Days Ahead: Wordfence’s “Sunshine Project” lights up Global Leaders

Jass (GLP Administrator), Ritah (FAF Uganda Executive Assistant) and Robert (FAF Uganda Programs Manager) show off GLP’s new gear

Dear FAF-Family, Advocates, Friends & Supporters:

It’s time I’m finally honest about what’s going on around here…

We’ve been keeping a secret from you. A big one. An EPIC, jaw-dropping secret.

This past Spring, Far Away Friends had the opportunity to share our vision for improving access to equitable education for children across rural Uganda with our friends at Wordfence, a Seattle-based cybersecurity firm. After hearing about our model school, Global Leaders Primary (GLP), and what we’ve accomplished as a small team with limited resources, the Wordfence team was eager to help us solve one of our biggest obstacles in achieving our vision: sustainable, reliable power.

With only a handful of lightbulbs in our classrooms and a few small solar panels, for several years GLP’s students and staff have shared with us their hopes for improving lighting and power resources at our school. I’ll never forget sitting with GLP’s Head Teacher, Tom Richard, one afternoon back in 2019 and chatting with him about what Far Away Friends should focus on next to make the biggest impact on both students and staff.

“Jayme,” he said, “If we could just have good lighting here, in all buildings, and enough power to fuel our printer and maybe just one computer — things would be so much easier here at school.”

After returning home from that trip, and learning how costly an entire solar-power system would be for our campus, we shelved our hopes of raising enough funding for such a project while more urgent needs (basically all of 2020) demanded our immediate attention.

Intrigued by our commitment to collaborating with local companies and stimulating local economies in northern Uganda (rather than relying on American volunteers), Wordfence invited Far Away Friends to engage in a further discussion on how they might be able to help make a collaborative impact. After mapping out our power needs at Global Leaders, Wordfence committed to not only supplying lighting to our classrooms, but to all buildings on campus — including security lighting and enough power to eventually fuel tech-based learning with a future computer lab.

Our school would be one of the first (if not the only) primary school campuses in the Amolatar region to offer this resource of robust lighting and power to our students and staff.

In alignment with Far Away Friends’ ethos, Wordfence hired local (Lira, UG based) electrical contractor, GreenMax, and a Uganda-based Solar Systems Monitoring & Evaluation company, TechNugget, to install five solar systems in Ingrid’s Hall (girls’ dormitory), Dylan’s Hall (boys’ dormitory), the classrooms and computer lab block, the clinic and office blocks as well as the teachers’ quarters.

With these added solar systems, our students will now be able to get ready for school in well-lit dorms, walk to school on safe and well-lit paths thanks to new security lights, and be educated in classrooms with bright lights and electrical outlets for future computers and tablets. The teachers, (whose own teacher-housing apartments are now fully equipped) will now be able to expand their lesson plans with the use of computers and lights, no matter what time of the day school is in session.

After weeks of work between COVID lockdowns, several evaluations, meetings and staff trainings later, I am SO proud to announce the completion of “The Sunshine Project” thanks to the generosity of our friends at Wordfence, and their loyal customers. We are so grateful for the opportunity to partner with a globally-minded company like Wordfence on such a transformative project!

In the video below (created in partnership with Uganda-based Malaika Media), I want to invite you to see (and share!) the tremendous impact this project has made:

If you’d like to learn more about our collaboration with Wordfence and their work, read all about it in their latest blog post or check out their website here.

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