One of the crucial areas that our organisation/ministry focuses is on not just spiritual transformation but also the social economic empowerment of women and young girls /young adolescent mothers in their families. The recent covid-19 lockdowns left so many young adolescent girls with unplanned for and unwanted pregnancies. According to UNFPA (2021), total of 354,736 teenage pregnancies were registered in 2020, and 196,499 in the first six months of 2021. This has brought an ugly scene on them because, at its worst, those responsible for the pregnancies and the babies have been offering less support or in most cases nothing at all. The resultant factor is the girls experiencing tough motherhood in their early years. Secondly, even the married or single mothers in an adult age still struggle to fend for themselves and support the children under their care in their homes as their husbands have relinquished support for them.
In this respect, our ministry comes in the mobilize and support these women and young ladies by first identifying, mobilizing and supporting them to form groups from which our objective of social economic empowerment can be realised. In these groups, with support from the community development officers, these women are provided with financial literacy on saving, borrowing, investment and other group dynamics. In these groups, we support the women with such important tools as passbooks, saving boxes, ledger books, padlocks and we do provide periodic mentoring ad monitoring to keep the groups intact. In these groups still, every member is encouraged to borrow at a very low interest rate, generate profit and return the principle funds with interest to the group coffers and this has worked pretty well. And this this worked as members can borrow to buy grocery items, pay school fees, meet medical bills as well as invest in a small scale business entity at a very friendly interest rate. On the contrary, communities are awash with stories of banks confiscating people’s property because of failure to pay back money lenders and bank loans which were advanced to individuals with high interest and lots of other hidden charges. These women groups have played smart and steered of this.
One other important activity that takes place in this group is the social/emotional support to each when one is going through traumatizing or challenging situations. This comes from general sharing but also from the social fund that each member if challenged to contribute too. It is to help a member to not only overcome grief, feel loved and supported by the rest of the members but also to celebrate during grief or times of happiness like the birth of a baby etc.
To-date, our ministry has supported 4 groups in 3 communities and because it has worked wonders, we need to open up and spread to other areas. Our challenge to the groups is for them to look beyond the savings and borrowing but also organize their capital to procure assets like grinding mills, engage in poultry business and look forward to value addition of agricultural goods like packaging among others.
UNFPA (2021) Addressing teenage pregnancy during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Support to women social economic empowerment
Since we have been able to identify, form and informally train some women in communities into four groups across two sub counties of Sironko District in Easter Uganda, we are appealing for probable donors from friends like you as we need to create self-sustaining groups. This can only be realised when we support these groups with training in financial literacy, group dynamics, instruments of work like saving boxes, ledger books, saving books, padlocks and start-up funds among others. Our focus is to train, mentor them and support them into self-sustaining independent groups with less minimal supervision from us. The entire budget to realise this program is estimated to be US$7500.
| Details | Quantity | Unit cost | Total cost (UGX) | Total cost (US$) 3800 | Total cost US$ 3400 |
| Participant meals | 100 | 20000 | 2,000,000 | ||
| Accommodation | 100 | 50000 | 5,000,000 | ||
| Transport refund | 100 | 20000 | 2,000,000 | ||
| Venue hire | 3 days | 200000 | 600,000 | ||
| Training materials | various | 1,500,000 | 1,500,000 | ||
| Trainers fees | 3 | 150,000 | 450,000 | ||
| Tools | Various | 1800000 | 1,800,000 | ||
| Start- up capital per group | 4 | 2,500,000 | 10,000,000 | ||
| Registration fees for VSLA groups | 4 | 150000 | 600,000 | ||
| Program coordination | 2,000,000 | ||||
| 25,410,000 | 6,686 | 7,474 |
.
