Our Work

Helping Hands works in Kamuli, Jinja and Mukono

Helping Hands works with children in Uganda in Sub-Sahara Africa. Our work is based in rural communities in Eastern Uganda where the River Nile runs out of Lake Victoria. Due to administrative borders the children we work with live in three districts: Kamuli, Jinja and Mukono.

The people there are warm like the climate and with so much joy about you can sometimes forget about the struggles families face. However, if you are born there you are 22 times more likely to die before you are five and if you survive you can expect to live at least 30 years less than a UK resident (UNICEF, 2007).

The rural communities we work in are quite different from the cities and towns in terms of their development due to higher levels of illiteracy, poorer infrastructure and limited intervention
measures. The statistics are sobering:

• Almost one in six children die before their 5th birthday
• Malaria is responsible for nearly half of those deaths
• Two thirds of child deaths can easily be prevented
• Over half of the households have no adequate sanitation and no-one has running water
• Everyone cooks with charcoal stoves and most use candles or kerosene lamps
• Almost everyone is a subsistence farmer and earns less than a dollar a day

See Helping Hands Fights Malaria.

Statistics from Ministry of Health, Uganda (2001), WHO (2004), Helping Hands (2009)