Across rural Uganda, where community-powered learning has proven effective, education nonprofit and long-time Notre Dame collaborator Building Tomorrow provides resources, training and support to ensure that hundreds of thousands of school-aged children receive an educational foundation that empowers them to thrive.
The organization — with an all-time enrollment of more than 560,000 students — taps into the capacity of local changemakers, recruiting university graduates as fellows and engaging dedicated individuals as community education volunteers. And it continues to make an impact. In 2024 alone, it helped 80 percent of its enrolled learners improve in literacy and numeracy by one grade level.
Partnering to improve education outcomes
At its founding, Building Tomorrow partnered with several universities — Notre Dame among them — to establish chapters across the United States to fund the construction of schools in Uganda. In 2010, graduates from Notre Dame’s School of Architecture supported this mission by designing a school in the country’s Kiboga District. This long-standing partnership, established through shared values and deepened over the years, has evolved into an ongoing collaboration with various units within Notre Dame on research initiatives, including the Keough School of Global Affairs and its Pulte Institute for Global Development.
Since the organization’s first shared research work with Notre Dame in 2013, Building Tomorrow's history of collaborating on studies has included a 2023 randomized controlled trial assessing the impact of fellows and community volunteers on early education outcomes in the regions where they work. These early findings have influenced programmatic decisions in teaching methods, curriculum development and overall educational strategies.
Building Tomorrow uses data to improve the way education is developed and delivered to students. The organization is equally committed to evaluating its actions and improving its work to create meaningful change in Uganda; currently, the group is building off evidence from the completed 2023 study to assess the persistence of learning efforts and how to set communities in Uganda up for success to ensure the impact of their work is long-term. With the help of Notre Dame researchers, many from the Keough School’s Pulte Institute, they are studying teacher practice and government policy over time.
United by a shared commitment to education and community-driven change, Notre Dame researchers and Building Tomorrow have fostered a dynamic collaboration culminating in the group’s involvement in the new study “Graduating from Learning Poverty.” The project is funded by the Notre Dame Poverty Initiative, a University-wide effort to create a world intolerant of poverty by expanding knowledge about how to solve it.
Leveraging research and local expertise, the Building Tomorrow team in Uganda and the research team on campus at Notre Dame work to co-create study designs to assess the implementation of education interventions and innovative, sustainable solutions. Research focuses on front-line impact, fostering genuine co-creation with Building Tomorrow to ensure lasting progress.
“We appreciate the fact that Notre Dame has been really intentional about being partners in the project,” said Whitney Warren, Building Tomorrow’s chief education officer. “We are research partners, not research subjects.”
Looking to the future, Building Tomorrow is driven to organize the power of a growing network of community volunteers to implement foundational learning throughout the country in the hopes that one day, the need for the organization’s work will cease to exist. By demonstrating the impact education volunteers provide in the community, Building Tomorrow aims to encourage government adoption of its model, communicating how community-powered educational success is achievable and sustainable. Warren said the organization wants to continue strengthening this approach to educational intervention, promoting its success, and sharing what has worked in the education sector
Through its long-standing partnership with Notre Dame, Building Tomorrow continues to explore ways to enhance learning outcomes, ensuring that every child has the opportunity for a promising future. Beyond driving impactful development initiatives in Uganda, leadership for the organization — and researchers at Notre Dame — aspire for this collaboration to contribute meaningfully to global discussions on education policy and sustainable development.