What you need to know

• Every three months, Deo Kusemererwa’s family faced the same challenge: finding 70,000 Ugandan shillings (about C$25) for school fees. His mother sold fruit in the market, but earning enough was a constant struggle. When the fees went unpaid, Deo was sent home, labelled a “defaulter,” and his report card was withheld.
• At 10, he received three years of support through Plan International’s Child Sponsorship program, allowing him to attend school uninterrupted.
• After sponsorship ended in his community, he finished school with support from family, neighbours, and community members and went on to university to study social work.
• Today, he is a 35-year-old filmmaker, husband, and father who believes all children deserve access to education and credits sponsorship with helping give him hope for a different future.
• Uganda has made significant progress in expanding access to education, yet about one in five children there still does not complete primary school.

Growing up in Uganda, English was the class Deo Kusemererwa struggled with most. Not because he didn’t want to learn, but because he was rarely there when class began.

In the mornings, while other students were settling into their desks, Deo was working, cleaning the school with his mother. They did whatever needed doing: sweeping classrooms, clearing garbage, scrubbing floors, and cleaning toilets. By the time he finished, English class had already started.

Only later would he understand how much those missed hours mattered.

Before a teacher arranged for him to clean the school in order to cover his fees, Deo’s attendance would be in flux. He could only attend when his fees were paid, which meant he had to drop out of school for weeks at a time.

When this happened, Deo borrowed classmates’ notebooks and copied everything by hand late into the night.

“I was always trying to catch up,” he explains. “Always trying to prove I belonged.

“They used to call us defaulters, the ones who couldn’t pay. When we could come to school, we had to sit at the back of the class. It made us feel like maybe we were failures. That feeling tortured me so much.”

When life is uncertain, hope makes all the difference

Deo grew up in poverty outside Uganda’s capital city, Kampala. He describes his community as “a ghetto, where everyone was struggling and life was always uncertain.” His mother sold fruit in a market for income and sometimes asked neighbours for food for Deo and his sister, Ann.

“My mother carried everything on her shoulders,” he says.

One day, when Deo came home from school, the family found that they had been forced out of their rental. With nowhere else to go, they moved into a neighbour’s garage. “When you’re a child, you don’t call it eviction,” he says. “You just feel the fear.”

His father was a polygamist with multiple families who moved in and out of Deo’s life. When he was present, Deo never knew what to expect.

“It tortured me psychologically when he was there,” Deo says. “He didn’t even think about what we needed, to be at school, to be educated.”

He remembers often sitting in class unable to concentrate. “You are at school, but you’re thinking of going back home,” he recalls. “You know there will be fights. Quarrelling. All that would really disturb me.”

Around him, boys his age were leaving school altogether. “I saw many boys drop out,” he says. “Some went into drugs. Some into gambling. I didn’t want that life.”

Child Sponsorship covered his school costs

Deo was 10 when Plan International’s Child Sponsorship program stepped in to support his primary school.

Plan was working with the community to identify children in vulnerable situations, students whose education was most at risk. “The teachers didn’t feel we deserved to be singled out, but a local leader intervened on my behalf,” Deo shares. “He said, ‘This child deserves to be in school.’”

The Child Sponsorship program covered Deo’s fees, allowing him to attend school uninterrupted and walk into class each morning with the other students. “Being sponsored changed everything,” he says. “For the first time, my hands didn’t smell like cleaning products when I came into class.”

Not long after, his first letter arrived from the sponsor he had been matched with. It was written in English.

“At that time, I mostly spoke Luganda, which is a local language,” Deo explains. “I couldn’t understand what had been written, so a neighbour read it aloud to me. The sponsor talked about having a dog and two cats. She asked about my life and encouraged me to stay in school. No one had ever asked me like that before. That letter gave me hope. Before that, I didn’t feel hopeful.”

He kept every letter after that. He kept photographs. He kept a pen his sponsor once sent him, with a cartoon character on it.

“Even the pen meant something,” he says. “They were proof that someone cared, proof that I mattered.”

When a community steps up, children thrive

After three years, Plan completed its work in Deo’s community and moved on, as sponsorship is intended to work. The sponsorship ended, but the foundation remained.

From there, Deo’s education was held together by many hands. His father stepped in intermittently, helping with school fees when he could. Aunts contributed. Neighbours helped, not always financially, but in other ways.

One of them was Senga. “She didn’t have much,” Deo says. “But when I came home tired, with no food, she would give me something to eat. She would talk to me. She used to tell me, ‘Everything is possible. Don’t lose hope.’ She was like a second mother to me. Across Africa there is a word for this kind of care: ubuntu. It means ‘I am because we are.’”

Deo says his life only makes sense because of the people who carried him when he couldn’t always carry himself. “I didn’t grow alone,” he says. “I was grown by others.”

He finished school, and then did something unusual for someone from his background: He set his sights on going to university to study social work.

“I wanted to help other children living through the kinds of instability I had experienced,” he says, adding that his dream “was to show my father that despite everything, I could still become someone who makes the family proud. And to show my mother that her efforts to support us didn’t go to waste.”

Learning the power of storytelling to change lives

Deo was good at music, dance, and drama and talented enough that he received a scholarship in music to help cover his university fees. To raise the additional funds, he worked long hours in an internet café.

After graduating, Deo struggled to find work. That was when he began volunteering with a community organization that supported women living with HIV. Using a simple digital camera, he documented their stories.

“That’s when I realized how powerful stories can be,” he says. “I used to think cameras were just for weddings and birthdays. I didn’t realize that you could be a humanitarian filmmaker.”

His camera also led him into the world of girls’ cycling, a sport surrounded by myths in his community, including the belief that riding a bike could cause a girl to lose her virginity.

For Deo, cycling is about more than sport. “When I cycle, I feel free,” he says. “It’s like the wind clears my mind. Cycling became a way to heal. When I’m anxious, when life feels heavy, I get on a bike and I feel like I’m moving toward something better.”

That experience helped draw him to stories about girls finding confidence and belonging through cycling. One of his recent films, Laying Down a Legacy, follows Florence, a young cyclist breaking barriers in a sport long considered to be only for boys.

But Deo knew that finding stories was one thing; telling them well was another. While freelancing as a filmmaker and editor, he decided he needed to sharpen his craft, so he enrolled in the Toronto-based Art of Documentary online training program.

“I wanted to be both a social worker and a filmmaker,” he says. “Someone who understands people, and who knows how to tell their stories properly.”

When children are educated, everyone benefits

After the COVID-19 pandemic, Deo created his own film production company. Today, he works as a filmmaker and editor, drawn especially to stories about education and girls’ equality.

He is also a husband and a father. Deo met his wife, Patience, when she was selling tea on the streets of Kampala. They are raising three daughters. “They speak English better than me,” he says, smiling.

He’s now working toward another dream: building a permanent home for his family, something he never had growing up.

“Maybe that’s why one of my biggest dreams today is simple,” he says. “To build a home for my family. A place where my daughters can feel safe. A place they will never have to leave.”

He’s building it gradually, saving what he can each month. “When I can, I buy a few bricks,” he says. “Sometimes a little cement. Each time I get one step closer to that dream.”

As a parent, Deo is equally clear about what he wants for his daughters’ education. “I’m trying to give them the best education possible,” he says. “I want what I missed to be given to them.”

When he speaks about education now, he is unequivocal. “A child deserves to be in school,” he says. “Girls. Boys. All children. It’s their right. Education matters, not just for students but for the community. Everyone benefits when children are educated, because they come back and contribute.”

And if he could speak directly to his sponsor today? “I would say: You helped give me hope. You gave me the light that guided me to where I am today. And because of ubuntu, because of the people who lifted me, I can now lift others.”