Meet Ambrose: a Monitoring and Evaluation Manager for Acts for Water, serving communities in Uganda. He lives and works in Uganda alongside his wife and their young child. 

Acts for Water provides underdeveloped communities living below the poverty line with clean water, sanitation, and hygiene. Ambrose says, “Where the road ends is where we go.” In addition to this, Acts strives to do so in a sustainable way. More specifically, they help identify a sustainable water source uphill from a community, and they will develop the infrastructure that will allow this water to collect and travel with gravity down to a tap within the community. 

In addition to this main initiative, Acts works alongside communities to help identify challenges and needs surrounding sanitation and hygiene and to find solutions that work. They also train communities in sustainable entrepreneurship. For example, Ambrose shares a story of teaching a community to make soap for good hygiene and sanitation and how to sell this product to others. These initiatives help improve physical health within these communities and can also increase the community’s overall household income. 

Growing up in Uganda, Ambrose’s community did not have access to water. He remembers traveling far distances early each morning to collect water for his family. Water collection was very demanding, tiring him out before starting his day and often getting him in trouble at school for being late. Ambrose explains that a routine like this can be challenging to sustain, causing children to drop out of school simply because they do not have access to water.

Fortunately, Ambrose managed to continue attending school, and he eventually went on to achieve a bachelor’s degree in Quantitative Economics, specializing in statistics and economics. Since then, he has worked with different organizations until he secured his position with Acts. Ambrose was promoted to a leadership role within a short time and now serves on the organization’s senior leadership team.

In addition to his personal experiences with access to water, Ambrose is passionate about making an impact in the lives of others. Through economics, Ambrose learned about humanitarianism and how to work with communities. Understanding the effect that he can have on different communities brings him great joy. It motivates him in the work that he is doing today.

Ambrose is excited to further develop in his leadership journey at ALI. He shares that he has a lot to learn and believes that attending the Abundant Leadership Institute will be an excellent investment into his skills and future as a leader. Ambrose looks forward to learning from the perspectives and experiences of the other leaders attending the program. He believes building these connections will also help strengthen himself as a leader.