Busubi founding Power of Communities Hub
Published on 12 September 2026 at 12:16 GMT
By GS Leaders Nexus (Hub Register)
In the photograph, nobody is looking at the camera. A dozen children and young people sit shoulder to shoulder along a red wooden table, heads bent over stacks of white paper. Each holds a needle. Loose cotton thread lies in small heaps between the sheets. They are sewing notebooks - the kind sold for a few hundred shillings at any trading centre, except that these are made in a village hall in Busubi, from paper that would otherwise have been thrown away, by people who a year ago had never bound a book.
The picture was taken in August at the Busubi Empowered Communities Learning Centre in Lwengo District, central Uganda, and sent to the Global Society by a group that calls itself the Power of Communities Hub. On 1 August, twenty-three people from this village signed the hub's founding. By the end of the month it had become the first community hub of the Global Society anywhere in the world to complete its founding - and it did so by showing, rather than promising, what it does.
A village that built its own centre
Busubi is a parish of scattered homesteads on the red-earth plateau between Masaka and the Tanzanian border. Lwengo, the district it belongs to, was carved out of Masaka only in 2010 and is still one of the youngest districts in the country in more than one sense: the 2024 census counted 325,000 people here, and at the last full age count half of them were under fifteen. It is farming country - bananas, coffee, goats - forty-five kilometres from the nearest city.
The Learning Centre where the hub meets did not come from a ministry. John Ssentamu, a head teacher at the local primary school, founded Busubi Empowered Communities to fill the gaps he saw every day in his classroom. Since 2017 an Australian foundation has helped the group build, staff and stock a community centre that runs free classes seven days a week. A first book-making training there drew sixty-four people. The mud-brick stoves, the compost beds, the sewing tables - most of what the hub now lists as its capabilities was already alive in this building before the Global Society ever heard of it.
Seven things, in their own words
When the hub registered, the form asked for the wrong things - a menu of network roles rather than a description of local practice. Asked to write down what they actually do, the founders sent back seven practices, each in a sentence or two of their own. The Global Society entered them unedited.
There is soap making, "for household use and local markets". There is compost gardening, to "improve soil fertility, increase food production, strengthen household nutrition". There is plastic recycling: "We transform plastic waste into useful products, reducing environmental pollution, promoting responsible waste management, creating green jobs." There is the notebook workshop from the photograph, training "youth and women to manufacture handmade notebooks using recycled and locally available materials". There is a girls' club that works on "leadership development, life skills, mentorship, health education, safeguarding, entrepreneurship". And there is a room where girls and women learn to sew reusable sanitary pads.
Why the pads matter
That last one is worth pausing on. In Uganda, a girl's period is still one of the most reliable predictors of an empty desk. A diary study among secondary-school girls near Entebbe found them absent from school on 28 per cent of the days they were menstruating, against 7 per cent of other days. In rural Rukungiri, six in ten primary-school girls said they missed school every month for the same reason. The problem is rarely the biology; it is the lack of something clean to wear and a place to change it. A washable pad that a girl or her mother has sewn herself costs almost nothing after the first one and lasts a year.
The hub puts it more plainly: the pads "improve menstrual hygiene, reduce school absenteeism, protect the environment, and create livelihood opportunities". Four claims in one sentence, and each of them is what the founders say they have seen.
Eleven people in a room
On 23 August the hub held its first assembly. Every member was invited; eleven came. That number is not large, and the hub did not pretend otherwise. "It was a meaningful opportunity for members to come together, share ideas, and continue strengthening the work of the hub," John Ssentamu wrote afterwards. At the same meeting the members chose one of their own to be trained as a citizen journalist - the hub's first step towards reporting from Busubi in its own voice, rather than being written about. A few days later a new member joined, "after being impressed by the prospects", and the hub now counts twenty-four.
At the end of August the founding certificate reached the hub's two ambassadors, John Ssentamu and Beatrice Mirembe Bukirwa, with all twenty-three founders named on it. "We look forward to printing them, signing them by hand, and displaying them as a reminder of our shared commitment and responsibility," Ssentamu replied. He added a sentence that could serve as the hub's whole argument: the milestone matters, he wrote, to "all of us who have been part of the journey and believe in the power of communities to create positive and lasting change".
What a hub is, and what this one asks for
A community hub of the Global Society is not a project and has no budget. It is a group of people in one place who write down what they can do - for their own community and for others - and then keep a public record of doing it. Hubs can offer things to one another and ask for things they lack. Busubi was the first to use both lines. It offers to train others in handmade notebook making. And it is looking for one thing it cannot make itself: someone who has been trained in filmmaking, to help the village tell its own story on camera.
That request is now open to anyone in the network who can answer it. Until then, the work at the red table continues: paper, needle, thread, and a stack of notebooks that grows a little every week.
Written by a human author, edited with AI assistance.
Further information
Followings Foundation. The Australian partner of Busubi Empowered Communities since 2017 https://www.followingsfoundation.org/
