Making Uganda Safe for Every Child

Uganda | Strategy | Scale Readiness Recommendations | Preventing Violence Against Children

Bantwana Initiative Uganda (BIU) is on a mission to ensure every child grows up free from violence. Their flagship SAFE program works across families, schools, and systems to create protective environments where children can thrive.

The scale of the problem is staggering: three in four Ugandan children experience some form of violence in childhood, one in three girls are sexually abused, and nearly half of all abuse comes from parents or caregivers.

Against this emergency, scaling SAFE is not optional , but essential.

Challenge

Moving beyond direct delivery to enable others to scale SAFE

BIU set an ambitious goal: 10 million violence-free childhoods by 2035. To achieve this, the organisation needed to move beyond direct delivery and equip government, civil society, and communities to adopt and embed SAFE at scale.

But while SAFE had proven impact, scaling it was far from straightforward.

Barriers to scale:

Complexity: SAFE had 18 interventions- effective in BIU’s hands, but hard to communicate, replicate, or transfer to others.
Lack of a roadmap: BIU’s scale ambition wasn’t backed by a clear pathway, unit of scale, or milestones.
Internal delivery structures: The team was organised for implementation, not the facilitative role scaling required.
External constraints: Child protection was underfunded and politically deprioritised, creating a fragile environment for government uptake.

Together, these challenges risked stalling BIU’s ambition, making it urgent to distil SAFE’s core, codify what truly mattered, and build the organisational and ecosystem foundations for scale.

“You have no idea how strong you have left us. SAFE scale up has moved to the centre of BIU advocacy and business strategy. I have such clarity now. You went above and beyond for our team, giving us the confidence, language, and structure to talk about our work.”

— Susan Kajura, Executive Director Bantwana Initiative Uganda

Our Approach

Spring Impact partnered with BIU through a structured scale-readiness process combining rigorous analysis with deep co-creation. SAFE was distilled from 18 interventions down to three: caregiver and educator transformation, system and committee strengthening, and child agency and empowerment, supported by advocacy and movement-building. The result: a focused, transferable SAFE 2.0 model others can adopt and scale.

Diagnosing scale readiness

We conducted a diagnostic across five dimensions of scale readiness: solution effectiveness, scalability, scale pathway clarity, organizational readiness, and ecosystem readiness.

This surfaced both the strengths of SAFE and the critical barriers holding back scale.

Reframing BIU’s role

We stepped back to consider what organisational shifts would be needed to move from direct delivery to a facilitative, scale-enabling role.

We explored tensions, clarified trade-offs, and built alignment on BIU’s bold goal of 10 million violence-free childhoods.

Co-Design for Scale

We worked with BIU’s leaders and project officers to sharpen the SAFE solution, codify what truly mattered, and co-create the initial scaling model.

This included tools such as spectrum exercises, impact mapping, and partner profiling.

Outcomes

SAFE 2.0 model built: A simplified, scalable version of SAFE, focused on three core interventions and two accelerators.

Clear scale pathways: 20 leaders and project officers are now aligned around three distinct pathways – government adoption, strategic partnerships, and advocacy

Policy influence: BIU has a STARTING roadmap for shaping national child protection policy and expanding SAFE by focusing government adoption and strategic partnerships.

“Working with Spring enabled us to understand aspects of our work we can scale, the capacity of our teams, and how we can align roles and communicate our work to external audiences, especially donors: the value proposition.”

— Eric, Head of Program Bantwana Initiative Uganda

Need support on your own path to scale?

Drop us a note