Olivia Barker founded Kids Club Kampala when she was just 18 years old. Here she explains why and how it all began, and the organic process by which the charity has grown. 

I’m 25 and I’ve been running a charity called Kids Club Kampala in Uganda for the last eight years. When I was 18, I went on a volunteer programme in Uganda, and while I was there I got introduced to some of the slum communities in the capital, Kampala. I fell in love both with the place and the people, as well as being completely overwhelmed by the poverty.  

I ended up staying for seven months, and when I came back to the UK, I approached lots of big charities to see if any of them were willing and able to help me do something to improve the situation for the children living in the slums. None of them stepped up, and I felt quite disillusioned after that, but nonetheless I knew I had to do something. 

A proactive approach

The only thing to do was to be proactive, take the bull by the horns and just get on with it. So I went back out to Uganda, and along with some good friends I’d met there, set up a small project for around 200 children in one of the slum communities. We wanted to help give them a proper childhood, where they could have fun and feel empowered. We did what we could do with the limited resources we had at the time - which was to play games, sing songs and try to provide food, clothes, mosquito nets, soap and other basic necessities for the children. We also recruited friends and family to sponsor the neediest children to go to school (school is not free in Uganda and many children miss out on an education because of this).  

We first registered as an NGO in Uganda, but soon realised that in order to raise enough money to keep the project running, we needed to increase our fundraising in the UK and register as a charity there too. So, along with my friend Corrie Fraser, who is now co-director of the Kids Club Kampala UK office, we set up our official operations in the UK to undertake fundraising for the charity. It wasn’t easy to begin with, as we had limited time and resources (we were both full-time undergraduate students), but with a lot of hard work and dedication we managed to get it off the ground. 

Organic growth 

What started as a tiny project just grew and grew. People in Uganda started to hear about our work with the slum communities, and so many Ugandans wanted to come and volunteer with us. As word spread, more and more children turned up, and we just started responding to the needs that we saw. Lots of the projects we set up were in response to community members and children asking us for help in certain areas – for example, we set up our football training programme in response to a group of teenage boys coming and asking us for something positive that they could do. 

Eventually, as our experience and resources grew, our focus shifted from working just with children. We now work with teenagers and adults, offering as holistic a service as our resources allow. We operate in 17 different communities, reaching 4,000 children every day and providing a range of services such as feeding programmes, education support, counselling, foster placement for abandoned children and women’s initiatives. We even do community development and regeneration programmes. The key to all of it is that we’re grassroots and community led, enabling local people to take ownership of different projects in communities that need it. 

Sharing a salary

As the charity has grown, so has my passion for the work I do (as well as the workload!), to the point that it’s now become my full-time job. I share a full-time salary with Corrie; we are each paid for 2.5 days per week, even though we work many more hours than that. Our hope that is eventually we will both be able to pay ourselves a full-time wage, but the job is so incredibly rewarding in so many other ways: seeing children who a couple of years ago were severely malnourished now being healthy; seeing children now have the opportunity to go to school who previously had no hope of doing so; seeing a woman now being able to provide for her family thanks to our women’s initiative; seeing a child who was abandoned now have a loving home to stay in – there is no greater feeling!  

I never tire of hearing the stories and testimonies of individuals and even whole communities whose lives have been changed by the work of Kids Club Kampala. Seeing the impact is incredible, but hearing stories from people in their own words is priceless, and extremely rewarding.

Home and away

Today our registered office in Uganda, directed by my good friend Sam Wambayo who helped me set up the Uganda NGO, has six full-time staff members and five support staff, as well as a team of more than 100 volunteers from local communities who give up their time to help us run our projects. In the UK, we also recruit lots of volunteers to help us with fundraising, many of whom have flown out to Uganda to help with projects on the ground. 

Going forward, we hope to keep growing and developing Kids Club Kampala to help as many vulnerable children and communities as possible. Our big dream is to role out our model to other communities in need - for instance, there are thousands if not millions of children living in Ugandan refugee camps who we’d like to reach out to.  

I never really expected that this is what I would be doing with my life, but now I can’t imagine doing anything else. I am so proud of all that we have achieved, and although it’s not been easy at times, founding this charity is definitely the best decision I have ever made! 

Olivia Barker is co-founder and co-director of Kids Club Kampala. You can follow her on Twitter here @oliviambarker