School
Direct investment in Layibi College, from mentorship and career guidance for current students to funding the school's new main gate, plus close coordination with the school's leadership to lift academic performance.
About LACOBA
A brotherhood built by a technical school in Northern Uganda.
Founded in 1953 by the Verona Fathers, St. Joseph's College Layibi, nicknamed "Techo Parish," set out to produce first class intellectuals with strong Christian values, technical excellence, and sportsmanship. LACOBA is the fraternity its graduates built to keep that mission alive.
Est. 1953 · Techo Parish
St. Joseph's College Layibi
Our History
From trade classrooms to a region wide movement.
Layibi College began as a technical institution. Motor vehicle mechanics, carpentry, and bricklaying were its founding trades, alongside academics, with an intake of around 60 students a year. Between 1959 and 1962, apprenticeship courses were added to turn out more skilled technicians, and the school's reputation for technical excellence is the reason the local area is still nicknamed "Techo Parish." Generations of old boys who passed through its gates went on to become engineers, doctors, politicians, and community leaders across Uganda.
Government policy disbanded purely technical courses in 1964, leaving only technical drawing, woodwork, and metalwork on the timetable. A Level classes followed in 1975, and by 1984 a strong push from the school's supporters won Layibi an upgrade to a Uganda Technical College offering a Diploma in Civil Engineering alongside ordinary secondary education, a program that ran until 1988. Technical subjects have remained compulsory at O Level ever since, and the school still publishes its own newsletter, The Clarion, and fields teams in rugby, football, track, tennis, volleyball, and basketball.
LACOBA formalized that shared history into an association with a clear purpose: don't just remember the school fondly, actively strengthen it, support each other, and extend that support into the wider Acholi subregion community.
Layibi College main gate
archival photo from the conflict era, if the client has one
A School That Held The Line
Layibi kept its gates open through Northern Uganda's hardest years.
During the two decades of conflict between the Lord's Resistance Army and the Ugandan government, Layibi College's fortunes fell along with the rest of the region's. 39 of its students were abducted by the LRA, and every one of them eventually returned alive, though between 1987 and 1988 the campus itself was turned into a military base. The school soldiered on regardless, a period alumni still point to as proof of the resilience LACOBA now tries to carry forward.
That same era produced some of Layibi's most recognized old boys: the late Rt. Hon. Jacob Oulanyah, who rose to Deputy Speaker of the Parliament of Uganda; High Court judge and writer Anup Singh Choudry; engineers Christopher Ebal of the Judiciary and Benedict Okana, who supervised the World Bank funded Namuwongo low cost housing project in Kampala; and Dr. Felix Kaducu, Senior Lecturer at Gulu University's Faculty of Medicine, a small sample of the "first class intellectuals" the Verona Fathers set out to produce in 1953.
Three Thematic Cornerstones
School · Members · Community
Cornerstone 01
Cornerstone 02
Members
Savings clubs that give old boys a structured way to support their own families and vulnerable members of the fraternity, plus reunions like the Inter Cohort Sports Gala that keep every generation, from the earliest graduating classes to the newest, connected to one another.
Cornerstone 03
Community
Work that reaches beyond LACOBA's own membership: a pledge to plant one million trees across the Acholi subregion, an annual marathon that funds traditional schools, and collaboration with the Old Students Associations of other schools across Northern Uganda.
Leadership
Run by old boys, for old boys.
Chair
Kinyera Chris Allan
LACOBA Chairperson, who has publicly framed the association's mission as reawakening the academic performance of traditional schools across the Acholi subregion, the driving idea behind the marathon and much of LACOBA's community-facing work.
Alumni gathering
Our Motto
"Melius Atque Utilius"
Better and More Useful. Every LACOBA initiative, from a savings club to a thousand-runner marathon, is measured against that same standard set by the school seven decades ago: leave things better and more useful than you found them.
See What That Looks Like
In The Press
LACOBA and Layibi College, as reported elsewhere.
Monitor
Layibi College soldiered on during the LRA war
A look back at how the school survived two decades of conflict in Northern Uganda, and the alumni it produced along the way. Read on monitor.co.ug ↗
ChimpReports
Gulu: Old Students urged to focus on eradicating poverty
Coverage of a LACOBA marathon, with Gulu City leadership pledging support for the association's tree planting and academic-revival efforts. Read on chimpreports.com ↗