About Us
13+ Years of Community Empowerment
The SSPP story begins in the year 2010 with a young man with big dreams in jinja city, Uganda. As a student leader, this young man had a lot of opportunity to guide and inspire students into being productive and impactful not only to themselves but to the surrounding communities as well. Throughout the stay in high school, he often collected (together with other students) material and extra/ no longer needed clothes to give to the poor in the surrounding communities. Over time, the households we often gave commodities like soap, food etc. always wanted more. It was with this background that Ian Calvin Waiswa rallied a group of students in 2013 to help the same communities in better ways. By then, the students decided to volunteer in a market information system that was being implemented by ARD (Action for Relief and Development) We saw the impact that just information gathering and sharing can have in the improvement of household income and overall wellbeing. Farmers were linked to better markets through this information sharing. By this time, we had grown to 10 fully devoted members who soon left jinja to join other universities most of which were in Kampala. We all went with this knowledge and decided to keep spreading word at the best opportunity we got.
While at the university in 2014, Ian got introduced to IKARE and shared the goals and ambitions of what the SSPP was trying to build. With the same philosophy to help communities live better. What had become different now is the option of health and livelihoods and how they balance and interconnect. The more we learnt at the university, the more we realized that a healthy mind builds a wealthy life and all this can only happen in a healthy body. We decided with IKARE to start knowledge exchange with the community that was feeding us as students (we bought chapatti and food from these kiosks in the slums as our hostels were next to them) The long journey of knowledge exchange started. And because we believed in it, we were incubated in an already existing organization as a student department by then. For two years we operated with mentorship from High Heights Initiative until both High Heights and the now Students Support and Philanthropy Program were confident that we have capacity to manage, implement and report on grants received independently. That is how the SSPP was birthed. Today, we operate as a platform that gives opportunity to teach communities on best life hacks to better life choices and healthier lifestyles as we learn and collect data to document and use to better the SSPP.
