By LeRoy Boikai | President/CEO
Thanks to our generous donors, Village Improvement Project, Inc. has received full funding for its solar lantern crowdfunding campaign on GlobalGiving. As a result, VIP, Inc. will be distributing additional lanterns to 187 families in rural Liberia during the Christmas season. Christmas is a special time of the year in Liberia that is filled with traditional feasts and celebration. These traditional feasts involve people dressing in beautiful African attires, cooking lots of food and putting on a big performance by masked dancers and traditional drummers. This is perhaps the happiest time of the year for most Liberians.
Imagine a village Christmas celebration in which all homes have bright solar lanterns on at night instead of dimly lit kerosene lamps or battery flashlights. Five villages plus our pilot project village in a rural part of Liberia will experience this kind of transformation during Christmas time in 2015. It's possible that for once, orbital satellites may be able to capture a small bright spot on the map of Liberia that's never appeared in satellite photos of Liberia at night. Your support of VIP, Inc. is helping to "light the night and illuminate Liberia" one village at a time.
Village Improvement Project is also excited to be awarded support through the GlobalGiving Feedback Fund to help us better understand and be more responsive to the rural village communities we serve in Liberia. As a startup nonprofit, we want to enhance our capacity in collecting and effectively analyzing feedback data to measure the impact of our community development initiatives.
We are in the final phase of capturing feedback and are anxiously waiting to learn from the data. We will use this feedback to help us better understand what drives sustained adoption of clean energy. Our learning will contribute directly to identifying what works best to improve the lives and livelihoods of those we are seeking to pull out of extreme poverty.
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