Bridget Katungi - Campaign Ambassador 2017

"Prior to my reign as Miss Uganda UK, I remember the first time I was made aware of Child Sacrifice was through a documentary on BBC. The stories from victims who survived were horrific. Words are not enough to describe the level of devastation and helplessness I felt. To finally be able to be a part of the solution with Jubilee Campaign was a major deciding factor in competing for the title.

Being on the ground In Uganda, our work was predominately targeted at school children in order to sensitize them and equip them with information on how they could protect themselves to reduce the risk of abduction and consequently sacrifice. We visited 8 schools and saw over 9000 students. We also enrolled an art and writing challenge to allow the children to creatively express what they knew of child sacrifice in which 696 children participated and the top 3 in each school were sponsored a terms school fees and the rest were awarded certificates for participation.

Nothing could prepare me for the heart wrenching stories of those who had been directly affected by this phenomenon. Listening to young children re tell their experiences of their siblings going missing and never seeing them again or finding their friends corpses dismembered was traumatic in itself, let alone knowing this was their lived experience. When you're not directly impacted it's so easy to reduce these children to mere statistics and numbers however these are REAL children!!

We were also hosted for TV interviews with NTV Good Morning and Talk with Gaetano and published in the local newspapers which exposed our work nationally and opened up important dialogue on how to safeguard children better.

It was such a humbling experience and I was so grateful I had the opportunity to contribute to the work being done nationally and internationally to put an end to this unnecessary violence against children. I will continue to use my voice to unite the nation as it is everybody's responsibility to be an advocate for the voiceless and fight to enforce and protect the rights of our children, our FUTURE!"