.jpg)
Building Tomorrow is committed to community-powered learning, and CEVs are our conduit to sustainable community engagement. Our mobilization starts with Fellows, recent Ugandan university graduates whom we deploy to underserved rural areas, and it was our first cohort of Fellows in 2015 who identified the need to leverage members within the community as allies in raising support for education.
CEVs are recruited based on their passion for education, range from retired civil servants to farmers, and are vetted by local authorities. CEVs with an O-Level education are considered Academic CEVs, and are eligible to be trained to deliver Building Tomorrow’s Roots to Rise (R2R) literacy and numeracy camps. In these camps, CEVs deliver R2R lessons with the curriculum incorporating Universal Design for Learning techniques and social-emotional learning connections to foster positive and inclusive learning. CEVs have proven effective, as a randomized controlled trial confirmed that they delivered learning gains equivalent to 1.1 Learning-Adjusted Years of Schooling through just 160 minutes of individualized instruction, leading us to elevate them further in our model.
BT Fellows have recruited over 19,000 CEVs all time, including 3,657 in 2024. These CEVs donated 963,304 hours to educational programming in 2024, a remarkable increase of 72% from 559,070 hours volunteered in 2023. CEVs now facilitate over 80% of Roots to Rise camps, and reached 205,316 learners in 2024. In 2025, we aim to add at least 4,800 new CEVs, bringing us to an all-time corps of around 20,000. We are also working with local governments in two districts to build their capacity to take up our CEV networks. The aim is to have district-wide corps of government-coordinated CEVs in these districts by 2027.
Building Tomorrow hopes CEVs can gain the traction and reach of Community Health Workers in the health space, and welcomes organizations delivering similar community-powered initiatives or looking to add CEVs to their context to reach out to info@buildingtomorrow.org to join forces and share best practices.
