Who We Are
A Team That Believes Healthy Children Learn Best
School Health Africa brings preventative healthcare directly into Ugandan schools: founded in Kampala in 2021, run by Ugandans, registered with URSB, with our National NGO Bureau registration in progress.
Our Story
The Doctor Who Went Back to School
Marvin Ssemakula trained to treat sick children. He co-founded School Health Africa to stop them getting sick.
As a medical student, Marvin kept meeting the same children twice: once in a classroom, and again on a hospital bench. The boy with a fever that began with a jerry can of unsafe water. The girl whose teachers called her slow, until someone finally checked her eyes. Each problem was small, cheap and preventable. Each was caught too late, in the wrong place.
The right place, he realised, was the school. Almost every child goes there every day. Teachers already know which desks sit empty. So in 2021, with co-founder Eric Muwonge, Marvin set out to bring the clinic into the classroom: safe water at the tap, deworming and vitamins every term, teachers trained to act in the first minutes of an emergency, and every child’s eyes checked.
Medicine sharpened the idea. During his internship at Gombe General Hospital and Kiruddu National Referral Hospital, Marvin saw what prevention misses: children arriving with conditions that a school health day could have caught months earlier. His interest in eye health made one lesson concrete: a wall chart and twenty minutes can change a child’s whole school career.
Today Head of Operations Titus Mukiibi keeps that rhythm running, school by school. Together the team has reached 1,500 children in 5 partner schools and trained 40 teachers as first responders.
“In hospital I treat one child at a time. In a school, we can protect four hundred before any of them falls sick.”
Leadership
Who Runs School Health Africa
Dr Marvin Ssemakula
Co-founder & Board Member
Medical doctor. Internship at Gombe General Hospital and Kiruddu National Referral Hospital; special interest in eye health.
Eric Muwonge
Co-founder
Titus Mukiibi
Head of Operations
Runs the termly health-day programme across partner schools.
Where We Fit
Deep in a Few Schools, Not Thin Across Many
National programmes in Uganda already screen children’s eyes, train school first-aid teams and improve school water, usually one service at a time and at large scale. We do the opposite: all four preventions together, in the same partner schools, every term, with each school’s results recorded in its health-day log. Where a national programme already reaches our schools, we work alongside it rather than duplicate it.
How It Works
A Model Built for the School Term
No clinics. No waiting rooms. We bring preventative healthcare to where children already are: their classrooms.
- 01
We Enter the School
Partner with school leadership, train teachers, and baseline-assess child health status.
- 02
We Deliver the Program
Install water systems, run termly health days (deworming, vitamins, screenings) and build teacher capacity.
- 03
We Measure & Scale
Collect health and academic outcome data, publish impact reports, and replicate in new schools.
Our Mission
To place preventative healthcare inside every partner school in Uganda: clean water, nourishment, trained teachers and healthy eyesight, so that no child’s education is interrupted by an illness we know how to prevent.
Our Vision
A Uganda where every school is a healthy school, where attendance registers record children who are present, nourished and able to see the board, in every district we reach.
2021
Founded in Kampala
5
Partner schools
1,500
Children reached
40
Teachers trained
$25
The Cost of Prevention
per learner, per year. That is what prevention costs.
Because our model brings healthcare into the classroom instead of building clinics, a full year of prevention costs twenty-five US dollars per learner. That single figure covers safe drinking water, termly deworming and vitamins, teacher first-responder training, vision screening, and the field team and reporting that deliver them. Prevention is the most cost-effective healthcare there is.
Priced in full: staff and reporting included, nothing hidden.
What Guides Us
Values We Practice, Not Just Print
Dignity First
Every child is someone’s whole world. We serve with the respect we would want for our own.
Do No Harm
Evidence-based interventions, parental consent, and safeguarding on every school visit.
Partner, Don’t Prescribe
Schools lead, we support. Programs survive because head teachers own them.
Evidence Over Anecdote
Every dose, screening and referral is logged and published. Data is our backbone.