DUNSTAN WAI MEMORIAL CHARITABLE FOUNDATION INC
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Mission Statement
The mission of the Dunstan Wai Memorial Charitable Foundation is to empower African girls through education. In African countries, as in most of the developing world, education is much more readily available to boys than to girls. Poverty, gender bias, cultural beliefs, as well as fear and instability due to conflict, have meant that most girls, even those with academic promise, are not able to attend school beyond the primary level. Recognizing the need to reduce this gender gap, the Dunstan Wai Foundation was founded to improve the lives and futures of African girls by providing them with the financial and emotional support to continue on to secondary school and beyond. Our work is based on the belief that educating a girl will benefit not just the individual girl, but also society as a whole, by serving as a critical tool to lift her out of poverty and realize her full potential.
About This Cause
The Dunstan Wai Memorial Foundation finances scholarships for girls and young women from South Sudan and northern Uganda to support their secondary- and tertiary-level education. The Foundation was created in 2005 to honor the memory of Dunstan Wai, a former World Bank staff member originally from Kajo Keji County, South Sudan. Dunstan recognized that in order to lift girls out of poverty they needed to have increased access to education. The Foundation is headquartered in the Washington, DC area. It’s Board of Directors include former colleagues and admirers of Dunstan Wai as well as his widow Nyakwea Wai and adult son Kagondu Wai. It is supported annually by more than 150 contributors, many of them former colleagues of Dunstan Wai at the World Bank, but also an increasing number of younger people interested in Africa, women’s education, conflict resolution and economic development. The Foundation’s scholarship program is administered on a volunteer basis by two remarkable nuns. Sister Lily Akedi of the Comboni Missionary Sisters manages the tertiary program from Juba, South Sudan. Sister Florence Oryema of the Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and her two assistants support the secondary-school program in northern Uganda from Moyo, Uganda. The first scholarships the Foundation awarded went to girls in South Sudanese and Ugandan secondary schools in 2006. Each year, about 25-30 new primary-school graduates are selected to receive a scholarship for tuition, room and board for their four to six years of secondary school. The selection criteria are need (they must come from poor families) and academic promise (they must have performed well in primary school). In 2017, the violence in South Sudan forced virtually all Wai secondary-school scholars to flee to refugee camps in northern Uganda. Remarkably, staff located all of them and immediately enrolled them in six Ugandan secondary schools. The COVID-19 epidemic closed schools in 2020 but the Wai Foundation supported continuing education programs for students in the refugee camps and provided regular tutoring, solar-powered reading lamps and radios to enable students to participate in on-line learning. Since schools reopened in 2022, the program is supporting 135 secondary-school students -- 86 are refugees from South Sudan and 46 from northern Uganda. In its 18 years of existence, the Foundation has supported more than 1400 cumulative annual scholarships for girls in secondary schools In 2011 the Foundation began to fund young women at the tertiary level, allowing selected secondary-school graduates to pursue advanced studies at the certificate and diploma levels. In all, some 90 young women have received our support for their studies in health care and other fields in which graduates are in demand. This year (2024), twenty-nine students are enrolled in schools in South Sudan and Uganda. Recognizing that not all girls are interested in or able to continue with academic studies, the Foundation began in 2021 to finance vocational training for interested secondary-school graduates. Students have received training in hairdressing and tailoring. The Dunstan Wai Foundation has managed to navigate the twin tragedies of violent conflict in South Sudan and the global COVID-19 pandemic to continue to support the educational dreams and promise of girls and young women in one of the least developed places on earth.