PEPSKA is a Presidential affirmative action initiative for Karamoja and Ateker guided by the philosophy of getting all persons of school-going age, the street and displaced children, child mothers, the Karachunas, former warriors and warriors in the Greater Ateker Region to go to school. It seeks to leave no one behind.
Dr. Rev. Sr. Kaahwa has thirty years of experience and capacity building in technical fields of Teacher Training, Supervision and Monitoring, Mentoring, Community Mobilization, Research, Writing, Publishing, Consultancy and Curriculum Designing. She is a religious Nun from the Congregation of the Daughters of St. Theresa from Uganda. She has been serving as Senior Lecturer of Professional Studies, specialized in Curriculum Studies at Kyambogo University (KYU).
PEPSKA is a Presidential affirmative action initiative for Karamoja and Ateker guided by the philosophy of getting all persons of school-going age, the street and displaced children, child mothers, the Karachunas, former warriors and warriors in the Greater Ateker Region to go to school. It seeks to leave no one behind.
PEPSKA, an independent Directorate of KAPATU, is headed by the Director in the office of the University President. Its role is to mobilize and co-ordinate bursaries and scholarships to support learners to enroll, stay in, and complete school.
The beneficiaries of the scholarships will be carefully selected and assessed to receive full bursaries to study at any level from pre-primary up to tertiary education and University level.
Apart from providing financial and material support for the learners, PEPSKA will also hold workshops, seminars, and counseling sessions, offering psycho-social support according to the learners’ level of education.
These sessions will focus on building life skills and reproductive health education. They will be organized during holidays so as to bring all the PEPSKA beneficiaries together.
The strategic long term outputs of PEPSKA are that it shall keep learners in school from nursery, primary, secondary and university levels.
PEPSKA shall cut off the supply chain of recruits into cattle rustling and other acts of lawlessness and criminality in the region.
PEPSKA will provide alternative life styles to the warriors or Karachunas by training them and turning them into productive citizens.
Warriors are what we call Karachunas although the term also applies to village un educated youth who are usually lured into cattle rustling business.
PEPSKA will prioritize peace initiatives in the Karamoja sub region and the greater Ateker community in general as found in the Turkana Province in the Republic of Kenya and the Toposa in Western Equatoria Province in the Republic of South Sudan.
The logic of PEPSKA is that there cannot be peace in Karamoja without Peace among the Turkana of Kenya and the Toposa of South Sudan. The Karamojong, the Toposa and the Turkana are one family. Therefore, what happens in one community affects the other hence this peace project must take these three communities as one unit.
In essence, PEPSKA is a peaceful disarmament Programme implemented by Karamoja Peace and Technology University.