The Ugandan school helping students turn waste into livelihoods through hands-on learning
St Kizito High School Namugongo, an independent secondary school in Namugongo, Uganda, is equipping students with the skills to turn waste into income-generating opportunities through a hands-on, sustainability-led learning model. Located in a major religious pilgrimage area with thousands of visitors passing through, the community has faced a longstanding problem with waste that creates environmental and health risks for the local population. Instead of treating waste as something to be collected and disposed of, the school used it as an opportunity to equip students with practical skills grounded in real-world application.
Supported by teachers and shaped by the needs of the community, the school introduced student-led green circular projects, in which learners work in clubs to run initiatives that convert waste into usable products. Taking place four days a week under teacher supervision, the clubs encourage learners to actively engage in hands-on projects where they can apply what they’ve been taught.
Built on an experiential and project-based learning model, a flipped-classroom approach sees students visiting markets, forests, and slums before returning to class to brainstorm and investigate, design, and implement practical solutions centred on skills development. Learning is reinforced through competitions, peer-led initiatives, and creative formats that encourage behaviour change, while teachers play an active role in supervising and assessing project work as part of overall academic performance.
Through this model, students gain hands-on experience, including producing carbonised briquettes from bio-waste, creating livestock feed from food waste, composting for bio-fertilisers, and running hydroponic farming systems. Another key aspect is helping students build entrepreneurial skills, and many have gone on to produce and sell goods, creating a circular economy that holds true sustainability impact.
Families and the community have also felt the impact as students apply what they learn at home. Knowledge is passed to family members and peers, giving learners a sense of leadership and accountability in building stronger environmental responsibility.
Student-led projects have reduced fuel costs by 25%, lowered the need for firewood, saving between 12 and 70 tonnes of trees, and reduced respiratory complications among the school’s kitchen staff. The production of livestock feeds has reduced farming costs up to 80%, while hydroponic and urban farming initiatives now supply the majority of the school’s vegetables. More than 50 learners support their tuition through the green skills they have learned, and more than 100 have started their own small-scale green businesses at home, proving that the impact extends beyond school walls.
The school has won multiple awards, including the National Environment Management Authority Environmental Award and recognition as a finalist in the Zayed Sustainability Prize. It has influenced national education policy with schools across Uganda now adopting a competence-based curriculum and has become a recognised benchmark for skills-based environmental learning, with more than 30 schools adopting similar approaches and others visiting to learn from its model. In terms of teacher recruitment and retention, it has the lowest staff turnover and the highest number of applicants in the district. Teachers have also learned new skills alongside the students, empowering them to build practical projects they can practice outside of school as additional streams of income.
By transforming a community challenge into a collective opportunity, St Kizito High School Namugongo is upskilling students to become accomplished multipliers of environmental action and responsible community role models.
