His Story
Ten years in. Still going deeper.
Melvin has spent ten years working in rural schools across Uganda. Not studying them from a distance, but travelling into communities, training volunteers, enrolling children who had been left out, and watching what happens when a child gets the right kind of support at the right time. One of the children he helped enroll back into school in 2017, after months out of class, recently finished Senior Six and will be joining university this year. That is the kind of return that makes the distance worth travelling.
He started this work as a Building Tomorrow Fellow in Lyantonde in 2017. One of the things that stayed with him from those early years was how quickly children moved when someone worked with them at their actual reading level instead of the level their class was supposed to be at. He saw children who had been stuck for months begin to read within weeks. That observation has shaped everything ELI does.
Melvin holds a Bachelor of Business Administration from Uganda Martyrs University and a Certificate in Professional Digital Marketing from the Chartered Institute of Marketing, UK. But the work taught him things no programme could.
"I have watched teachers struggle alone with eighty or more learners, no storybooks, no support, doing their best inside a system that gives them very little. And I have also watched children in those same schools learn to read, retell stories, raise their hands for the first time. Both things are true. The second one is why we keep going."
Melvin Asasira, Founder
After his fellowship, he served as a Technical Advisor with Building Tomorrow under the Mastercard Foundation's Tomorrow Is Now project in Nakasongola. When COVID-19 closed schools, his team did not stop. As part of that project, they took the literacy work into homes, reaching over 500 learners during closures when every other program had paused. That period reinforced something he had already started to believe: the children who fall furthest behind are always the ones whose learning depends entirely on schools being open. It is part of why ELI's model does not stop at the school gate. Volunteers follow up in the communities, meeting children where their days actually happen, not just where the timetable says learning should.
In December 2025, he left Kampala and moved to Lyantonde to live where the work is. It was not a sudden decision. For years he had been travelling back and forth, meeting teachers, checking in on communities he had worked with. The move was simply him stopping the back and forth. He already had volunteers on the ground. He already trusted the people doing the work. Moving there full time meant the work could go deeper and faster.
Equal Learn Initiative is the organisation he has been building toward since 2017. It carries forward everything he has learned about what makes literacy work stick in rural communities, and what makes it fall apart.
Track Record
Technical Advisor · Building Tomorrow / Mastercard Foundation · Nakasongola · 2020 to 2022
Recruited and trained over 300 community volunteers who reached 1,800 out-of-school children across 100 villages. During COVID-19 closures, sustained literacy programs for over 500 learners when schools were shut.
STiR Education Volunteer Leader · Lyantonde · 2017 to 2018
Trained and certified over 30 teachers as change makers. Led eight rural primary schools in developing classroom innovations that improved student engagement and learning outcomes.
Building Tomorrow Fellow · Lyantonde · 2017 to 2019
Enrolled 780 out-of-school children, retained 690 through community support. Founded reading clubs, WASH clubs, and child protection clubs in four rural schools. Raised funds through a community marathon to train 500 girls in menstrual health.
