A Fellow who built a school
It’s 5:30 a.m. in Bulimu. For some children, the school day begins with an hour-long walk.
Across communities like Bulimu, Mukono District, distance can make getting to school a daily challenge. Long journeys can mean early mornings or missed lessons and for some families, difficult choices about whether a child can attend school at all.
One teacher saw this and refused to treat it as background noise.
Lunkuse Imeldah joined Teach For Uganda as a Cohort 6 In-Service Fellow, teaching Chemistry at Namanoga Secondary School. The Fellowship challenged how she understood leadership in the classroom. She learned to replace punishment with targeted support, give feedback that helped learners move forward and create a classroom where every learner felt confident enough to speak.
The first transformation was in Imelda herself.
“The Fellowship taught me that a confident learner starts with a confident teacher. I had to become that teacher first.”
Slowly, teaching stopped being something she did to a room and became something she did with it.
But the lessons she gained did not stay inside her classroom.
Imeldah kept thinking about the children around her who faced barriers to accessing education. She began asking herself what it meant to lead for educational change when some children could not easily reach a school in the first place.
Her answer was Rallies Junior School.
Today, Imeldah runs the school in Bulimu, Mukono District, serving 150+ learners, with 9 teachers and 3 support staff. The school currently offers classes from Kindergarten through Primary Five, with plans to extend to Primary Seven.
Imeldah started the school from the ground up and built it around the kind of leadership she experienced during her Fellowship: intentional leadership, mentorship and a learning environment where confidence and belonging matter alongside academic achievement.
For families in Bulimu, the school brings education closer to home. For Imeldah, it represents how leadership can move beyond one classroom and become a lasting part of a community.
“I wanted to build something that would outlast me.”
And her journey is still unfolding.
The next chapter could begin with you.
Ready to lead change through education?
The Teach For Uganda Female STEM Fellowship is an opportunity for young female STEM graduates to develop as education leaders while gaining meaningful classroom experience.
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