Village education

A year, in the timescale of international development, is barely a fleabite. But it marks a milestone in the development project that Guardian readers are generously sponsoring, match-funded by Barclays and run by the charity Amref, in Katine in north-east Uganda. The project is now a third of the way through its allotted three-year life span and since one of the innovations is continuous monitoring and evaluation, it is time to look critically at what has been achieved so far.

The project is aimed firstly at improving in a sustainable way the life chances of people in the area through improvements in health, education and livelihoods. But it also has a wider ambition; to harness the power of the internet and familiarise readers with the hard choices and slow progress that aid workers live with every day - in short, to move beyond the familiar charity appeals to try to understand why aid so often fails and how it might work better. The good news from Katine is the tangible improvement made to the lives of at least some of the 25,000 people who live in scattered settlements in a region cursed for 20 years by unrest and insurgency. There is, so far, one new school, and others have new textbooks. There are 20 new boreholes, a newly trained band of health visitors equipped with their own bicycles, a much greater knowledge of hygiene and access to pit latrines - all supported and managed by local committees who are gaining vital experience in organisation, while rebuilding the sense of community and mutual trust undermined by the years of fear and lawlessness.

Amref has established a local base staffed by Ugandan professionals working closely with the people of Katine and, equally importantly for the sustainability of the project, with the local council and government officials.

It has not been easy for anyone. It is tough for the people of Katine, whose needs are so urgent, to be told that Amref is often not planning to deliver the goods, but the means to acquiring the goods: not oxen, for example, but improved farming techniques that will increase income and enable farmers to buy their own oxen. It is tough for Amref to be subject to intense and public scrutiny from the very beginning. And it has been a hard lesson for the Guardian, and probably for its generous readers, to understand how difficult it is to use aid to the greatest effect, how slow the turnaround will be and how many lives will continue to suffer the blight of disease and poverty. War, insurgency and central government neglect leave deep scars. The reward has been in the encounters with the courage and energy of the people of Katine themselves as they start to rebuild their lives.