Nawe Wokwiga 2026: More Than 200 Children Started the School Year Ready
In Busangana Zone, Matongo Commune, more than 200 vulnerable learners received exercise books and essential school materials in the days before classes resumed, thanks to our Nawe Wokwiga campaign and four partners who chose to stand with them.
Every school year in Burundi begins with a quiet arithmetic in thousands of homes. School fees, a uniform that still fits, a pen, and notebooks for every subject. For families living with very little, that last item is often where the sum stops working, and where a child's education quietly stops with it.
This August, in Busangana Zone of Matongo Commune, the sum worked out differently for more than 200 children.
Through Nawe Wokwiga, Kirundi for "Even you can go to school", Youth Hope for Tomorrow distributed exercise books and essential school materials to vulnerable and disadvantaged learners. The timing was deliberate: not weeks into the term, when a child has already fallen behind or dropped out altogether, but in the days before classes resumed, so that each of them could walk in on the first morning with the same materials as everyone else.
The photographs from that day carry the story better than figures can. Notebooks lifted high above a sea of heads. Parents and guardians pressed together in the schoolyard, waiting their turn beside their children. Volunteers and local leaders moving through the crowd, handing over one small stack at a time. And on face after face, that particular kind of relief that arrives when a worry carried for weeks is finally set down.
None of it happened alone. This edition of Nawe Wokwiga was made possible by partners who chose to stand with these children: Milkaura Creations Inc., Nice Fashion, Haraka Burundi Company, and Dreaming for Change. Their support turned an intention into notebooks in real hands.
The campaign rests on four commitments we return to every year. Education as our priority. Solidarity as our strength. Equality as our promise. The future as our mission. Nawe Wokwiga exists because a child's right to learn should never depend on whether their family could afford paper that month.
More than 200 learners in Busangana are now sitting in classrooms they might otherwise have missed. It is a number we intend to grow.
If this story moves you, it can be repeated. Every notebook donated, every partnership formed, and every message shared brings one more child to the first day of school ready to learn. Together, let us support their success.
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