M-LISADA (Music, Life Skills, & Destitution Alleviation) Organization is a government approved NGO and registered home for vulnerable children.
M-LISADA stands for Music, Life skills, and destitution alleviation. We are a non-government organization with registration No. S.5914/8530. Located at Nsambya Ave-Maria Buyondo close in Kampala district.
M-LISADA was founded by Bosco Segawa in 1996. At 12 years old, he headed a team of 8 other vulnerable children and his 3 sisters. Bosco, who was orphaned at an early age took the leadership to mobilize fellow young children to live together and solve their problems.
Over 27 years ago, our work has been and is still about Protecting, Healing, Empowering and Supporting vulnerable children through music, life skills, and education. These children come from different walks of life and communities such as slums, streets, violent families, and rescues done by police.
Our Goal is Impact 100,000 people including children, youth and women by 2028.
We envision the Transformed lives of Uganda’s new generation by giving them a conducive temporal living environment, a lifelong foundation of learning experience, and a safe and secure atmosphere for each to reach their fullest potential in dreaming and realizing their dreams through education, skilling, and community empowerment.
Our core values as the organization include:
In Katwe, Bosco came upon a musical performance by the students at St. Peters School. He was captivated by the music and by the crowd applauding and showing their appreciation. That day he saw music as a way to create a new life. Bosco shared his inspiration and desire to learn music with his street friends and together they went to St. Peters School to see if they could be taught to play. Initially, they were turned away. But Bosco and his friends persevered, and eventually, Teacher Ssendawula agreed to teach them brass band music after school and on weekends. Using borrowed instruments, Bosco and his friends practiced as much as they could. They loved learning and playing music and saw it as an opportunity to change their lives.
In 1996 they met Christopher, an activist from Germany, who saw them playing music. When he heard that music was life for them and gave them a valuable talent, he suggested they name their organization M-LISADA (Music, Life Skills, & Destitution Alleviation).
In 1997 the M-LISADA band performed at Rainbow International School in Kampala. This concert marked the start of their public performances. Christopher went back to Germany and raised money to buy them their instruments. When they arrived, they bore the name M-LISADA on them.
The next year, M-LISADA rented a single windowless room home in the Katwe slum. At times up to 40 children would come and sleep on the floor. This was the home of M-LISADA until 2008.
M-LISADA added acrobatics to their performances, to give more children something productive to do, and to stand out from the rest of the marching bands. M-LISADA saw what the transformative power of music did for the almost all-male band. Because the girls were still intimidated to play instruments and were dissuaded from doing so by the surrounding community, M-LISADA created their cultural dance program as a way for vulnerable girls to develop music and life skills and to be part of M-LISADA.
In 2007 a safari tour company called Real Africa asked M-LISADA to perform for Chellaston Academy school from the UK. During the performance, the members of M-LISADA told the audience their individual stories and the story of M-LISADA. M-LISADA, in further conversations with Chellaston Academy, mentioned their most immediate need was for a bigger home and center. Chellaston Academy went back to England, and under the leadership of Richard Karran, raised money for the M-LISADA Organization. Chellaston Academy acquired the land where M-LISADA’s Kampala home is currently located.
In 2009, during a concert, a child who was performing with M-LISADA made a public request to the audience to support his education. The request was accepted by an audience member and M-LISADA’s official educational sponsorship program began.
In 2013, M-LISADA introduced their band to the local schools on Kalangala Island and opened a Brass Band outreach there. The following year M-LISADA began building their Kalangala Center which opened in 2016.
Initially, M-LISADA’s outreach programs worked with children who were on the streets of Kampala. However, the Kampala Capital City Authority (KCCA) and the police would take the street children to Kampiringisa Juvenile Detention and Rehabilitation Center where they were placed with juveniles who had committed crimes. In 2014 M-LISADA visited Kampiringisa, in an attempt to better the lives of the children detained there. M-LISADA’s Psycho-Social Support program originated in Kampiringisa when M-LISADA saw an opportunity to help transform the lives of two different populations: children and youth.
Dance of Hope, an International platform for cultural dance and education, was founded at M-LISADA. It was created to share the power and beauty of Ugandan cultural dances with a larger world, to provide vulnerable children with an opportunity to travel extensively and to give them a voice to share their cultures, communities, and stories with an international audience. In 2018, Dance of Hope toured the USA, performing at 45 schools in 15 states.
In 2019 after many years of planning, M-LISADA opened Passion Primary Boarding School, a school especially designed to recognize and accommodate the diverse and complex backgrounds and needs of vulnerable children.
Since M-LISADA started in 1996 we have worked with close to 2,500 vulnerable children and youth.
Child protection:
We give the children equal opportunity, to a safe and secure environment to grow in a holistic manner through the acquisition of critical skills, values and mindset essential to healthy nurture and enjoyment of the full children’s rights and freedoms. Our child protection program ensures that children are systemically transited to adulthood and fully initiated into the community with necessary competencies for maximum productivity.
Community empowerment is research based sustainable program targeting teenage mothers, vulnerable women and youths in health education projects, skilling, financial literacy, psychosocial support entrepreneurship. Most of the vulnerability that children suffer come from disempowered community members who have limited knowledge and access to the right health, financial, social and all-inclusive information about how they can improve their livelihoods and opportunities to develop and grow.
We work with children whose past is painted with violence, suffering and danger. We stretch into school, villages to support students, teachers, and the general community suffering from violent situations that emotionally, physically and socially impede their well-being for effective and efficient use of their physical and intellectual faculties to lead meaningful lives and behavioral dispositions.
We address family obstacles that frustrate the children’s learning at school whilst we support teachers to manage job/ career and family expectations in such a way that they are not overwhelmed to become ineffective at their service.
Performing arts and cultural education speaks to the core of our rehabilitation channels. We use performing arts to build social cohesion and appreciation of the cultural and multiethnic realities amongst the children, staff and stakeholders we work with. Preforming arts transcends the limitations of language and opens the doors of our children’s heart for them to be able to speak out as a way of facilitating the healing process. And above all, we uniquely integrate life skills development in the performing arts which enables us to cultivate critical skillsets foe holistic development and growth of our target groups.
All civilization is not hinged on education. Education plays a pivotal role in our transformation process of the vulnerable children, youth and women. We are motivated by the power there is in education aware that it can help the children to dream and pursue incredible careers, that call for different professional standards. We hope to nurture as many doctors, teachers, Musicians (artists) engineers, farmers, carpenters, designers as possible as a guarantee for impact in the lives of children and young adults in long and intermediate spaces of time.
We do this through enrolling children at different educational cycles of our education system such as Pre-primary/ Bridge Education Program (BEP) primary, secondary, vocational and university levels. Our mission is to give 545 children holistic education in the next five years.
Kampala continues to register 15,000 homeless children every year. Children who ought to be in schools, families, homes and taken care of by the adults’ rom streets amidst looming insecurity, health hazards, hunger and illiteracy.
M-LISADA organization only gives support to an average of 96 children annually and 8 children monthly.
We would rather that we support to reduce this number of 15000 by 50% in the next 5 years through our child protection activities where we focus on child reunification, for sustainability, skilling, education, performing arts, health and a home for the homeless.
M-LISADA Organization Board is a combination of various expertise, passion and commitment to make an indelible contribution to the nurturing of the new generation of young people in Uganda. Focused on equity, inclusion, and rights of the most vulnerable social groups of homeless children, youth, women, and the disabled from low-income communities, the board strives to guide the organization to reach over 8,855 children through vocational training, education, and Music alone in the next financial year.
Below is the team guiding the senior management to implement the programs.
Mr. Bosco Segawa is the CEO and co-founder of M-LISADA organization. As a former vulnerable child, He led a team of 8 fellow children to start M-LISADA using music as a means to address their challenges. He had just learned this skill from St. Peters Nsambya primary school where they had brass band practices.
Caught with curiosity, he joined the brass band team and fortunately he was taken on by the facilitator. Bosco envisions a safe environment for all children, youth and women to thrive through support geared at empowering them to reach their potential and solve their own problems in a sustainable way for total transformation. He plays a central role in fundraising and partnerships.
Patrick Wangira Jumah is a dedicated professional with a Bachelor’s degree in Social Sciences from Makerere University in Uganda and a Master’s degree in Psychology from the University of South Wales. With 16 years of diverse work experience, Patrick has honed his skills in child development, project cycle management, organizational development, strategic planning, resource mobilization, finance management, curriculum development, proposal writing, coordination, stakeholders engagement, and board engagements.
Having spent 12 years specializing in psychosocial support, particularly trauma healing in fragile contexts, Patrick is well-versed in planning, organizing, coordinating, budgeting, and implementing donor projects. His expertise extends to training and facilitation, strong people relations skills, effective leadership, and being a valuable team player known for his hard work ethic.
Patrick’s professional journey includes roles at organizations such as Cornerstone Development Africa as an administrator, CaRNaC Uganda as a network coordinator, and MendingtheSoulAfricaasaregionalDirector. Currently,heservesastheNationalDirector for CaRNaC Uganda and actively contributes to various civil society organizations by
serving on their boards.
Queenie holds Bachelor of Arts in Social Sciences and Master of Arts in Organizational Leadership and Management. She aspires to shape minds, transform hearts and nurture human productivity. She has 20 years of work experience with Civil Society Organizations; working from grassroots / communities to executive leadership level.
She also has 5 years of work experience with the Private Sector. She serves on governing boards of various organizations. Her core competencies are in the field of organizational strategy, grassroots program designing and technical business and vocational skilling. She is heading the education committee of the board.
Mr. Moses Matovu is a former civil servant. He is currently involved in personal enterprises. He fell in love with M-LISADA organization after hearing about the kind of work they were doing in his neighbor among the vulnerable children. He visited the M-LISADA premises as a result of curiosity and since then he started thinking of how he could support the organization which was being led by young people. He pressed in his request for the opportunity to support and was taken on by the board.
Moses is a graduate of business administration, and public administration. He is an instructor at Uganda price force and chairman of the union of the private waste and environment systems. He currently serves on the M-LISADA Board and heads the programs committee.
Mr. Decimon Wandera is former national programs coordinator at Teach for Uganda under the global network of teach for all, senior leadership development officer, guest lecturer at Makerere University college of education and external studies. He has 6-year experience in stakeholder engagement and management, program design, project management, curriculum design, 10 years in Education management and administration, 6 years in Leadership and instructional coaching and over 15 years of community empoweremnt.
Decimon joined M-LISADA as a result of the passion to work with young people for transformed lives. He studied psychology, social work, literature and English at Makerere University. He is the Board secretary and leads the implementation of the organization’s programs spread in 3 districts of kalangala, Kampala and Luweero for now.
Children’s nurse
Child Protection Officer.
Alumnus of M-LISADA and music instructor.
German Volunteer
Lifeskills and psychosocial support officer
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Matron M-LISADA Nsambya.
Finance officer.
Estate officer at M-LISADA.
Swedish volunteer.
Security officer.
Alumnus of M-LISADA and a gymnastics instructor
Shelter Manager-Kalangala
Community Development Officer
Teacher for Bridge Education Program
Music Officer
Music instructor.
