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Educate! sends African kids to school

Benson Wereje (bottom left) with Eric Glustrum (center) alongside staff and students from Educate!, which sends African kids to school.

Photo: Eric Glustrom

When college student Eric Glustrom raised $600 to send Benson Wereje to secondary school in western Uganda in 2006, he didn't know he'd be helping more than 1,000 other kids go to school as well. Not only did Glustrom's non-profit business, Educate!, fund Wereje, but it inspired the 27-year-old to create a similar organization in his own community, the Kyangwali refugee camp. Wereje raised money to pay for school fees and housing for impoverished youth—mostly orphans—who lived in the camp. Wereje knows what it feels like not to have money for food, let alone school fees. "When I arrived in Uganda, life was very hard for me to survive alone," he says. "But I was always thinking it was very important to go to school so I could have a better future." To date, Wereje's organization, COBURWAS, has paid for 800 students to enter primary school and more than 200 to go to secondary school.

Glustrom says COBURWAS—which has also built an orphanage, provided AIDS education and distributed mosquito nets to protect against malaria—has had a visible effect on the camp. After seeing what Wereje did, Glustrom developed a training program to teach other African youth to become social entrepreneurs. "We've seen students transform this community," Glustrom says. "It was their ideas, their initiatives. If we can help students across Uganda do the same thing, that has huge potential. Once they graduate, they'll be the next generation of leaders in their countries."