@ClubPilsener, Stop using AI for your content, unless of course AI has also started buying your products. We have countless young, talentedbpeople who can design for you, and the very least a business owes the market that feeds it is a few of the jobs it creates. Every AI ad you run to save a coin is a young Ugandan you choose not to pay, in a country where the same young people are your customers, your audience, and the reason your brand exists at all. There is something deeply broken about extracting money from a community while refusing to put any of it back into that community'. In the age of AI, companies will need to decide what kind of neighbours they want to be, because the technology now makes it possible to run an entire operation without employing a single human being from the society you profit off. The ones who choose people over the cheapest possible shortcut are the ones who will still have a market worth selling to in twenty years. Please, employ the people you expect to sell to. It is not only the ethical thing to do, but also the only way to build a business your community will still respect, and still buy from, years from now.

Dear friends, Yesterday, 17 September 2026, our volunteer training came to an end, and the end was an emotional one. Two of the volunteers asked to speak, one of them being Betty, who is our volunteer coordinator. Betty thanked the ELI team for thinking about their community, and for choosing, out of all the problems we could have picked, this one: children going through their own school without ever learning to read or write. She reminded the volunteers that the community is now their responsibility, and she asked them not to disappoint it. They would have to work together and support one another, she said, for the programme to succeed in their community. The second volunteer cried as she spoke. Over these three days, she said, the group had become family, and she asked that they stay family now that they know one another, and work as one. She said more than I can write here, enough to make me teary myself. As I told you yesterday, the people we chose for this work are the right ones. They care about the children around them, and they understand what it costs a child to leave school unable to read. Some of them spoke about children they know who dropped out, and they diagnosed it right. The child could not read, so could not follow what the teacher wrote on the blackboard or answer when asked. It builds and builds until the child starts to hate school. And in a place where education is not yet seen as a matter of survival, walking away from it becomes the easy thing to do. We finished the training strong, fresh commitments from the volunteers to go back into their villages as Changemakers who champion education. I was honest with them about how we raised the money for this training, and I told them something they did not know, that they have people all over the world cheering them on. I explained that I write about them and their work here, both to raise what we need to keep going and to show others the scale of the reading crisis in this country and how they can help, so that more people can find their own way to act where they live. You should have seen what it meant to them to learn there are people they don’t know rooting for them. Our volunteers know what they are up against. This problem runs across the whole country, and across much of the world, and they are choosing to fight the monster anyway, stakes and all. That makes me so proud, grateful too. They did not leave empty-handed. We handed over the materials they will use in the camps. Some were charts on which they will draw and reuse for many months to teach one group of children after another. They also received cardboards for making letter cards and word cards, markers to write them, ELI notebooks for planning their lessons and keeping their own thoughts, ELI manuals, and pens. We gave each of them an apron too, so they have an identity while working out in the community. The money we raised was not enough to get tote bags for their materials, the t-shirts, or the IDs we wanted for them, and I told them as much. I am confident that this is something we will sort out soon. We will keep finding ways to keep them motivated, even without pay. Paying volunteers is not something an organisation like ELI can sustain, and it is not in long term plans. They know this. We were clear about it from the day we recruited them, and they chose to be here anyway. So we now have our first cohort of ELI volunteers, trained and ready for the community. They will go back to their community, work with head teachers to identify the children who have been left behind, group them and start teaching them to read, one sound and one word at a time. This is where the work begins, and I could not be handing it to better people. Thank you for following this work. Please follow @EqualizeEduc. #EqualizingEducation