Building Tomorrow

Building Tomorrow is a community-powered non-profit that enrolls out-of-school children in East Africa and works to improve their foundational literacy and numeracy. Founded in 2006, the organisation is headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana, and operates in Uganda and Rwanda. To date it has enrolled more than 191,000 out-of-school children and reached over 652,000 learners with evidence-based learning programmes.

Its work is organised around the Thriving Schools Program, which comprises Roots to Rise, a literacy and numeracy initiative; the Building Tomorrow Fellows programme; and Tomorrow is Now, focused on education system strengthening. The organisation also runs a Primary School Construction initiative, building schools in partnership with local communities and governments. During the nearly two years of COVID-19 school closures, at-home and community-based learning run by Building Tomorrow was for many remote families the only formal education available.

The Building Tomorrow Fellows programme trains recent Ugandan university graduates as local change-makers who work with communities to identify, enrol and support out-of-school children. The network now numbers more than 500 Fellows, supported by more than 21,000 Community Education Volunteers.

Technical areas of work include foundational literacy and numeracy instruction, community-based education delivery, education system strengthening and at-home learning programme design. The organisation describes its approach as evidence-based and grounded in partnership with local communities and governments, with a focus on remote villages and underserved out-of-school children.