Our background

The Miles of Smiles Foundation was Founded by Josephine Nabukenya in 2012 with the goal of providing psychosocial support to youth living with HIV similar to the support she received as a child through camps designed to empower and uplift those living with HIV. 

In 2017 she identified and teamed up with a group of 12 other young people with whom she conducted a preliminary psychosocial camp in December of the same year which was a success. From this group of 12, she formed yet another team of 4 with whom she went on to formally register the Miles of Smiles Foundation as a Non-Government Organization in Uganda in 2020.

Over the years, the Miles of Smiles Foundation has been able to accomplish its goal of offering psychosocial support to youth living with HIV through a number of efforts:

• From 2017 to 2019, the foundation supported 15 health facilities and organizations to provide HIV-friendly services to youth and conducted 5 Warrior’s camps for adolescents and youth living with HIV who were facing adherence challenges and had a high viral load with a goal of achieving and maintain viral load suppression.
  
  

• From 2020 to 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the foundation provided basic needs to families of children, adolescents, and youth living with both HIV and disabilities with funding from the Queen’s Commonwealth Trust. The foundation supported over 150 families with food, soap, face masks, and delivery of ARVs during the country-wide lockdown.
  
  

• From 2022 to 2024, the foundation conducted 3 Warrior’s camps still focusing on adolescents facing adherence challenges totalling to 8 camps since 2017 and achieved over 90% viral load suppression among its 312 campers thus far.
  
  

• The foundation has also developed a mobile application called MO-smiles to offer e-peer support to adolescents and youth living with chronic illnesses by providing treatment and clinical appointment reminders, access to chat rooms with peers living with similar health conditions, a map of other health-related services within their community, and health information including stories of other youth and how they are thriving in life regardless of their health conditions. The application also supports health facilities to improve their services through the feedback system embedded in it. It also supports health workers to access up-to-date healthcare guidelines.
• On top of this, the foundation is also supporting adolescents and youth in schools with soft skills to enable them to make informed decisions about their life and career. The foundation’s soft skilling sessions are categorized into life skills, mental healthcare, and financial skills.
  
  

• Additionally, the foundation is empowering youth peer counsellors with psychosocial support and career guidance to enable them to transition successfully from their peer counselling roles to their next career. The foundation offers peer counsellors a platform on which to share their challenges without fear of being judged and a space where they can have relevant counselling sessions to support their transition.

• Finally, under the Series of Jojo initiative, the foundation is simplifying HIV cure scientific information into a community language that everyone, especially youth, can understand. HIV cure science is complex, and yet the thirst for it among young people and the myths around it are many. The foundation is therefore simplifying it for youth so they can keep up to date with what is happening in the field and understand what their role is in facilitating its success: finding a cure to the HIV scourge.