News
APRIL 2017: Amasiko.e.V. has very kindly donated the costs for building a modern kitchen for the school. This will make things much easier for everyone at the school and ensures the children and teachers are getting a substantial meal every day
Holidays
Come to Amasiko Homestay for a unique experience! Relax and enjoy the marvellous views of the lake from the comfort of the veranda of your cottage. Go for a swim in one of the few lakes in Africa where it is safe to swim. Explore the beautiful Ugandan environment and interact with the local community. Some of the highlights of Lake Bunyonyi are - visiting the Batwa community, bird watching, and canoe or motorboat trips on the lake.
At Amasiko we provide an excellent service and do our best to make you feel at home. In addition, we can take you for a cultural hike, introduce you to our projects and much more! Our accommodation includes full board and our cottages have been built in an eco-friendly manner. We believe that eco-tourism can facilitate the development of this region, and we use all our profits to fund our community focused projects.
Whether you come from Kigali or Kampala or anywhere else, Amasiko is the perfect place to recharge in a beautiful natural environment!
Projects
At Amasiko we believe that development is a long term, continuous process that needs to be sustainable and youth oriented. We focus on six projects: Ecological land use for agriculture and horticulture, using environmentally friendly building methods; maintaining our eco-tourism ethos; investigating and funding vocational training opportunities; we built a primary school, and we are committed to developing modern teaching techniques within the school; we contribute to the development of the rural community and we have a guest house for teachers and volunteers.
Elementary School
The nearest primary school is 6 km away – a distance too far to walk for the youngest children. It is because of this that many children do not attend school.
We believe educating the young is integral to instigating innovations. With money that was donated to our organisation in 2013, we built four wooden classrooms. We also have a brick building which is used as classrooms for the youngest students at our school.
We began our school with 4 teachers who taught 84 children. Now in 2017 we have 9 teachers and 152 children!
Support Amasiko!
We believe that our motto “learning for a greener future” is one that deserves your support. The children of Amasiko Green School, the people from the local communities around us, and we ourselves want to give you a heartfelt “Thank You!!” for the strong support you have shown us over the years - whether it be with materials, through volunteering or financially.
To ensure our efforts have a sustainable, long lasting impact, Amasiko Green School needs your continuous support! With a small effort from you, we can make a big effort and a big impact to give the youth and the farmers at Lake Bunyonyi the tools to improve their own livelihoods.
Any donation, financially, in the form of goods or through voluntary work is more than welcome to bolster our efforts.
In the long term, our aim is to become financially self-sufficient so that we can use the revenues from our eco-tourism and agriculture projects to finance the development of the local community.
Vision
After years of working on development projects in Africa, the founder of Amasiko, Wilfried van der Veen, ,realized that development work should be organized structurally differently from the traditional model, which seeks solutions to solve individual emergency situations or focuses on projects that run for maximum a few years. From this background, he developed a vision that was based on both his expertise and his commitment to sustainable agricultural development. He also made a deep realization that sustainable agriculture should also be a prominent aspect of life for the large group of children and young people who have to build a livelihood without support from friends or family.
Therefore, he founded Amasiko, which means “hope”, and developed the concept of the organisation around the motto "learning for a greener future." This means that we believe that:
- Learning is integral to development
- This needs to be sustainable
- Development is a continuous process
- It should be youth oriented
- We need to do this together.
We practise this through eco-tourism, organic agriculture, teaching children in our school, and providing vocational training opportunities for local people. We are a social enterprise, we rely on donations and we use the profits from tourism to finance our projects.
