About Tender Mercies

Mama Christine Ssonko Kyazze knows what it means to be left behind. When her father passed away, he left behind 27 children. Mama Christine, still young herself, refused to let her siblings scatter to the streets. She took them all under her wing, not because it was easy, but because she could not imagine any other choice.

The years that followed were gruelling. Stretching every shilling, navigating a world that rarely makes space for a woman carrying that weight alone, Mama Christine learned what hardship truly costs, not just in money, but in dignity, in lost childhood, in dreams deferred. She carried those lessons in her chest like a quiet fire.

What lit that fire into action was what she saw on the streets of Kasanje, her own community. Children, bright, curious, full of potential, selling eggs, hawking newspapers, drifting into harmful company, all because no one had paid their school fees. She could not look away. She would not.

She started with one child. One set of school fees. One uniform. Then two. Then twenty. Word spread quietly through Kasanje, the way good things do, until what began as one woman's act of mercy grew into an organisation. That was 1993. Thirty-three years on, Tender Mercies has touched hundreds of lives and continues to grow.

That belief, that education is the surest path out of poverty, has proven itself again and again. Children who once sold eggs on street corners have graduated as doctors, journalists, and lawyers. They have come back to their communities as builders, as teachers, as proof that the cycle can be broken.

“I never wanted anyone to suffer alone the way I did. If I could spare one child that pain, it was worth everything.” - Mama Christine Ssonko Kyazze, Founder