Empower AIDS Widows - Save a Community

Empower AIDS Widows Save a Community

Our dear donors, friends and well wishers we are pleased to present our quarterly progress report in this first quarter of the year 2013. Thanks for your generous support.

PROJECT STRATEGIES

The project focuses on empowering women and girl-child in rural eastern Uganda targeting three districts of Tororo, Bugiri and Busia. Empowering 5 Self Help Groups (SHGs) and educating them on aspects of Non-formal skills, agro-livestock (poultry, piggery and goats project), HIV/AIDS related activities including counseling, nutrition, care and support, OVC educational and basic support. RARUDO also intends to integrate cross cutting issues of environmental conservation in project activities of empowering women in the next quarter

PROJECT ACTIVITIES

Sensitization and mobilization of women and youth for training.

Training 120 Youth on non formal skills (vocational skills).

Supporting 558 needy children with scholastics, uniforms, and basic needs.

Purchase a variety of improved seeds for 5 women groups to mitigate food insecurity and tree planting to conserve environment.

HIV/AIDS counseling, nutrition, care and support for PLWAs.

Conducting planning, monitoring and evaluation of project activities.

The Needs (Nutritious foods for a better health) for 203 people December 2013.

PROJECT OUT PUTS

203 women sensitized and mobilized into 6 Self Help Groups.

50 youth and women trained on non formal and vocational skills this quarter and 30 are to graduate on August 2013.

The 5 Self Help Groups 3 districts in Tororo, 2 in Busia and 1 in Bugiri attained survival skills  training on HIV/AIDS in the past quarter, counseling,  nutrition and care in ongoing.

558 received scholastic and uniform this quarter 2013

86 women supported with 86 goats, 8 pigs.150 birds

761 both adults and children received Christmas package during December 2013 festive season.

LESSONS LEARNT

RARUDO has learnt to value and appreciate the importance of networking with local governments and other stakeholders. This has helped to avoid duplication of work and wastage of resources. For instance, before
selecting the sub counties and villages to support, we had to carry out a stakeholder’s analysis to know who does what where? We agreed to target villages with few service providers for our intervention so as not to duplicate
resources. We thus work together with the local community leaders, the schools, churches, health departments.

CHALLENGES

Overwhelming numbers of impoverished people needing support. We targeted only 120 youth and women and 50 of them for non formal skills course but over 300 turned up and wanted to join the non formal skills training, over 1000 children in Tororo alone came requesting for support.  However we could not take them due to delayed and
limited funding as per demand. Even for the meetings and trainings that followed we always had more people than we had planned and budgeted for. This definitely put a strain on our budget.

There is a limited resource base for RARUDO which does not only make it difficult to meet the demands of the target areas of interventions but also the overwhelming requests from the general community.

Our current coverage is limited to 3 out of over 15 sub counties in Tororo, 2 in Busia out of 13 and 1 in Bugiri out of 11.  Efforts to lobby from other sources to supplement support have not been very successful yet.

RARUDO is confined to support mainly women, Orphans, youth, girl-child, PLWAS the Elderly and persons with disability thus leaving very many other impoverished children like orphans due to others factor; illegitimate children, child mothers, children with disabilities and those who have dropped out of school helpless.

Rise in costs of items and commodities due to fuel crisis and the global financial crisis. This mainly affected the feeding and materials costs.

WAY FORWARD

There is need to continue empowering communities through sensitizations and training especially in HIV/AIDs, guidance and counseling, non formal skills, modern agriculture and Income Generating Activities management.

Enhance the capacity of the local community leadership and other existing structures so as to strengthen their participation in the implementation, ownership and sustainability of programmes.

Besides, there is need to vigorously diversify the income sources for RARUDO so as to increase the area of coverage and also include other aspects like formal education for orphans and other vulnerable children
in school, HIV/AIDS affected children, human rights programmes geared towards protecting widows and orphans due to HIV/AIDs, among other programmes.

CONCLUSION

In a nutshell, RARUDO is a very unique programme in the eyes of many stakeholders and beneficiaries. Although the project is ongoing, it has tried to work hard towards the attainment of planned outputs and results. The programme is being implemented based on the project plan and has so far registered a number of results which are positive but were not devoid of challenges as stated above. The challenges however, form a basis for RARUDO to
plan for scale up and for diversification of the funding sources so as to fill the gaps.

Our sincere thanks go to the local community leaders, school and church leaders and other actors with whom we have worked together in planning and implementation of most of the programme activities already carried out. Thank you our donors and thank you for your cooperation, insights and support that have helped us to make RARUDO more relevant and owned by the beneficiaries.

Yours sincerely,
Onyango Joseph
Executive Director,
RARUDO

 *Please see the attached expenditure detail chart.

• Expenditures detail (PDF)