A manual only works if the people it’s written for can actually use it. That constraint shaped every decision behind IREAD Canada’s Operations Manual — a foundational document for 19 partner schools across Uganda, written for educators and for the community stakeholders who form each school’s Community Management Committee (CMC), accountable for its operations — most of whom are not first-language English speakers.

The Brief

IREAD needed a single reference that could document process and best practice consistently across 19 schools, while also folding in newly announced 2026 national education policy so that every site was operating from the same, current standard rather than local interpretation or institutional memory. The manual had to do double duty: a governance document precise enough to satisfy policy alignment, and a working tool clear enough that a classroom educator — or a CMC member without an education background, responsible for oversight rather than instruction — could pick it up and use it without a translator standing over their shoulder.

The Approach

That second requirement drove most of the actual writing decisions. Plain-language drafting took priority over administrative polish — short sentences, concrete verbs, minimal jargon, and a structure that lets a reader find their specific procedure without reading the whole document first. Aligning to the new national policy meant tracking the policy language closely enough to stay compliant, then translating that language down to something usable, rather than simply appending policy text to existing practice.

The result treats accessibility not as a simplification of governance, but as a condition of it: a policy that isn’t understood at the school level isn’t actually implemented, no matter how correctly it’s written down.

The Throughline

The manual sits at the intersection of two things that don’t always coexist comfortably — the precision governance and policy alignment demand, and the plain language a diverse, multilingual frontline staff actually needs to act on it. Building both into one document, for 19 schools at once, is what made this a governance project as much as a writing one.