The groups at Tunguli village were recently visited and were provided with funds thanks to trustees, Bridget and Leslie's, fundraising efforts.
The funds have enabled them to purchase the required equipment to allow their microbank to get started. The Amani Centre told us "They are so thankful for the funds you have given them. They have appreciated that this program will empower them economically. They are so joyful to have this program."
As part of the Ecumenical Economic Social Empowerment Projects, seven groups of families from a small, remote village called Tunguli recently had training at Amani and have decided to set up Microbanks as their business initiative.
There are 7 groups in Tungili with approximately 190 participants in total.
FOAT is currently fundraising to help with some of the start-up costs. See more information about this on the FOAT fundraising page. The funds that have been raised have been sent already to Amani and the groups at Tunguli will be visited as soon as the heavy rains stop so that the funds can be distributed accordingly.
Funded by a grant from the John Pitman Charitable Trust, the ecumenical team were able to conduct outreach in the villages of Kiloka and Lugoba in November and December. At Kiloka many villagers participated.
Amani awareness group performed plays and sang songs to make sure the villagers understood that children with disabilities should not be persecuted but supported. More than ten children were advised to visit Berega Hospital (Anglican Mission Hospital), other children were advised to go to Amani for physiotherapy and eight children were advised to go to Mvomero Special school. These children are currently unable to attend their local school due to their hearing impairment.
The Ecumenical team continues to mobilize their respective churches to support disadvantaged groups. Thus the local church leaders can assist Amani to educate the villagers about disabilities.
In August 2019 Bridget and Leslie made a brief visit to Chalinze; developments here were impressive. Two of the groups had combined, had a strong Vicoba (Village Community Bank) which had already enabled a number of the individuals within the group to take loans to start/enhance their own businesses including small shops, cafes and a hairdressing salon. They had also obtained Government registration and were making an application to borrow further funds.
This project, begun in February 2018 funded by the Anglican Communion Fund, focussed on training and supporting small groups of families with children with disabilities to develop small enterprises to generate income for themselves. The two villages, Chalinze and Tunguli, chosen for this project were geographically remote from Amani but families with disabilities had already been identified in both locations through earlier ecumenical outreach work. In August 2018, after the project had been running for just six months, Trustees Bridget and Leslie Green visited Tunguli and were impressed by early developments. Most of the groups had initiated chicken rearing projects.
There was no doubt in Bridget and Leslie’s minds that this project was proving a tremendous success and given an injection of further funds, could be emulated elsewhere to empower families with children with disabilities to work cooperatively and help to lift them out of poverty.
The result has been that this joint effort was able to reach a greater range of families than was possible before the collaboration. As a consequence of this outreach work, many families responded positively to the education on health of the children with disabilities, but the challenge was that of family poverty.
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