Katchereza Primary School ran the activity alongside Misozi, using exactly the same materials and the same order: questions first, then the drawing prompt read aloud word for word. Running two schools identically is what made it possible to compare them — and it is the same discipline we ask of every classroom that joins now, anywhere in the world.
“When we asked them to draw the future, most of them did not draw what they wanted. They drew what they expect.”A teacher at one of the founding schools, Kasungu
What the drawings showed
Across both founding schools, almost every child said that protecting wild animals mattered to them. But when they drew the future, the pages filled with cut stumps, fire, bare hillsides and empty land. Seventeen children out of the hundred and fifty drew a future with no animals in it at all, several writing the words across the paper. A smaller group drew the opposite: parks full of elephants, lions and birds, with people living alongside them.
That gap — between what children say they value and what they actually expect to happen — is the finding that started this project, and the question we are now asking in classrooms elsewhere.
Drawings are shown with the school's permission and carry no names. Photographs that show children's faces are published only where a guardian has given permission for that specific image.