Support 1000 young mothers with beehives in Uganda

Dear Esteemed Partners,

2^nd Season honey Harvest 2022!

We send you warm greetings from Masindi District 200Km away from Kampala City,

This year we were supported by Women in Environment Development Organization-WEDO) with additional 100 bee hives, Thank You WEDO! we support more 20 women in Karujubi division in Masindi District with 5 boxes each.

There is growth on the number of new members being supported with bee hives by Budongo Women Bee Enterprises.

What is in plan

1. We are creating a database of all bee farmers in Masindi this will help us measure how much honey we can produce for export by 2025.
2. We are mobilizing more resource to supply more bee hives as the production of honey is still low to meet the market demand just 200kg in the last season ending March 2022.
3. By end of this year 2022 we aim to supply up to 500 boxes totaling to 800 boxes in the community
4. We plan to secure the Langstroth beehives, which have higher honey output.

Next step

Safeplan Uganda continues to train and support more women with beehives, girls with sanitary reusable pads and other community projects supported by other partners.

We continue to mobilize and create awareness about environmental changes and other community issues including poverty, gender-based violence and human rights.

Challenges

1. There has been a dry spell for a long time most bee hive boxes have not been active we might not harvest much honey this time
2. Low production capacity of the boxes are also affecting our return on investment in the project.
3. Some boxes are consumed by fire and warn out which requires replacements

These challenges and climate change effects such as prolonged drought, dwindling number of bee colonies due to high use of chemicals and poor vegetation which makes the bees travel long distance for nectar thus low honey output.

This year alone we plan to add additional 500 boxes with kind support from partners and our own contribution from recoveries we are left with 400 boxes to meet this target.

I send my sincere appreciation to everyone who supports our initiative in by all means.

Thank you

Daniel-Program Manager.

256 774 911 480

Email: akena05@safeplanuganda.org

Links:

• About Climate just Interventions

200Kg of Honey- 1^st Season 2022!

Dear Esteemed Partners,

We are indeed grateful to all of you for your kind support, Thank you!

Since we launched our campaign in 2019 on GlobalGiving you have donated $6,422 from 65 donors impacting more than 300 women with more than 300 beehives distributed to date.

In the last year alone 2021 we received a total donation of $3,924.02, producing more than 100 beehives, and enabling us to meet our operational cost during the difficult time of COVID-19 lockdown of 2021.

It has worked--Success story

When we reviewed our distribution to ask each member make payment with the honey harvest, our very first season was really good we managed to visit 100 boxes and harvested 200Kg of honey with just below 5Kg of wax, the honey was pure with very little waste. If we sale all our honey we expect to earn up to $1,200.

This approach is awesome and more sustainable as compared to absolutely free bee hives; we shall reach more people quicker if the members pay on time.

Opening the economy came with fees challenges, increasing fuel prices, food shortages for household slowing down the group activities, however all these did not stop the members from harvesting the fruits of their efforts.

Next step

We continue to train and support more women with beehives through our loan recovery plan. To date the group member have paid up to 10 bee hives and we hope to raise more funds and produce more bee hives to give to our members

Limitations

1. Some of the major limitation is households are still going through challenging time because of planting season many homes go with only a meal in a day affecting their daily savings.
2. Secondly the cost of fuel and commodities are affecting the end price of products this have drastically slowed the progress of the group activities.

Although these challenges are hampering progress in the enterprises, the bees are busy collecting nectar and doing their best to make honey, this is rainy season the plants are flowering and we expect better harvest in the next season.

This year alone we plan to add additional 500 boxes with kind support from partners and our own contribution from recoveries.

Thank you again for your kind support we shall always count and appreciate you for your contributions.

Thank you

Links:

• What stakeholders are saying about Gender Just Climate Solutions
• Understanding Climate justice and Gender

Deear Esteemed Donors,

Happy new year 2022!

We are pleased to share our progress with you all.

Since September 2019, Budongo Women Bee enterprise campaign has been active on the GlobalGiving platform and you have generously donated $5072. With 63 donors in2021 alone we received a total donation of $3,423,52 together contributing to more than 200 beehives and impacting directly lives of more than 100 women.

During the COVID-19 years 2020/21 we managed to reach additional women groups (30members) with beehives, the Tweyombeke Agro-Conservation Association (TACA) who have received 110 beehives to date.

Your donation also helped us meet most of the operating cost in the organization as this was the only source, we relied on to support our activities. For this we say; Thank You So Much!

Aside of beekeeping project we have been reaching out to teenage girls affected by the prolonged out of school days leading to several of school growing girls getting unintended pregnancies. Some of the girls have left their home due to social and economic pressure above all exacerbated cases of violence in homes and communities are some of the drivers of unintended pregnancies.

It’s estimated that more than 1 million girls got pregnant during the prolonged out of school days, Masindi alone has more than 1,000 girls as young mothers or expecting to deliver before end of 2022.

One of our approaches is offering psychosocial support and increasing access to skills training and input-based support so these young girls have another chance to generate income to support their babies.

Plan ahead

We have a task to mobilize more young women up to 1,000 to support them with life saving skills which include, skills training in tailoring, psychosocial support, distribution of beehives and promoting life saving cooking and lighting technology.

Ongoing activities.

We continue with our initiatives to multiply beehives to benefit more women by allowing women to pay $23 up to 2 years per beehive as a refund to replicate beehive boxes to other members. We continue to:

• Provide training and extension support to the female beekeepers
• Continue developing and aiming to scale the production of honey herbal syrup
• To engage women especially young mothers with training and mental help support
• To continue fundraising funds to support more mothers in the rural communities of Masindi.

Challenges:

We are still short of resources such as;

• Human resource which we cannot sustain due to lack of funds
• Lack of capacity to fully engage on fundraising activities to support our good initiatives
• Funds to support our staff and activities, that is why we appreciate the efforts of volunteers who endeavor to make our work possible.

Call to action:

There are many more women in the community in high level poverty, young mothers as low as 16 years, YOUR donation is much more needed than before, therefore your help is highly appreciated.

To continue supporting the women of our community please visit https://goto.gg/41496 and we say THANK YOU in advance!

Dear Esteemed Donors,

We are so excited to share our happiness at Safeplan Uganda with all our donors because with our project the Budongo Women Bee Enterprises, since the campaign was launched in 2019, we have moved 1,000 miles much more as compared to the journey we moved from 2014.

In the recently concluded Climate change campaign, we managed to fundraise $2,991.02 from 24 donors and this enabled us;

1. To produce our own sample of herbal syrup, we started with 20 litres or 200 bottles of 100mls.
2. To produce 100 beehives boxes to a new group called Tweyombeke Agro Conservation Association.
3. To clear all outstanding rent arrears and pending bills up to June 2021.

 We are indeed grateful for your contributions

We really appreciate how busy you are, however if you are interested to read more about our activities please visit our project reports, maybe read detail report below or learn how we make herbal syrup by visiting Kamilisha Herbal Syrup

Once more we are indeed grateful for your generous support.

Your sincerely,

Birungi Annet

Executive Director

Safeplan Uganda.

More Stories about the Report.

Budongo Women Bee Enterprise is one of the Safeplan Uganda initiative founded in 2014. Until now, the project has won two Awards and impacted more than 1,000 lives, supporting women groups with more than 250 cost recovery bee hives boxes.

In April 2021 by joining other non-profit organization during the GlobalGiving Climate Campaign, we managed to raise almost $3,000 which enabled us;

1. To produce our own sample of herbal syrup, we started with 20 litres or 200 bottles of 100mls.
2. To produce 100 beehives boxes to a new group called Tweyombeke Agro Conservation Association.
3. To clear all outstanding rent arrears and pending bills up to June 2021.

We also created a new partnership with one women’s group to benefit from our beehives loaning scheme – Tweyombeke Agro Conservation Group. Our intention is to increase honey production by multiplying beehives to benefit up to 1,000 each with 5 beehives by offering bee hives at initial cost of $10 and the women pay $25 for up to 12 months. We hope if they fail to raise the balance, they can pay with honey harvested. The groups are responsible for managing the beehives, and maintaining the apiary sites, while we at Safeplan Uganda provide free training and extension support to ensure the members benefit from the enterprise. We also try to link groups to both local and international partners. This way we are creating both funding and buyers of our honey products.

1. In our new partnership with Tweyombeke Agro Conservation Association, we have supported them with 100 cost recovery bee hives and working on additional 70 bee beehives which we collected from initial payments
2. We also supported them with hand tools for carpentry so they can also make their own boxes if they have the timbers and other raw materials.
3. We have signed a memorandum of Understanding for this partnership for 3 years.

Tweyombeke Agro Conservation Association (TACA) is a registered local women group operating in one of the villages in Masindi where Safeplan Uganda operate its activities. They meet every Wednesday to save money which is shared at the end of the year. During the saving meetings they come and clean the apiary site as a group and all other activities which includes tree seed planting, agricultural seed multiplication and all other activities as a group. Safeplan Uganda also takes advantage of the group to sell energy product solar and cook stoves. These were all made possible because we have someone to move with us, to impact communities in Masindi.

We are mending a new partnership with Equity bank, a local finance institution that support youths and women with small loan of $100 -300. They support the group with financial literacy and other skills to manage their savings in the group. This way the groups can take small loan to finance individual apiary sites and also invest in household enterprises.

Overall, Safeplan Uganda works hard to ensure it meets its objectives. We appreciate our partners and well wisher who extend their support to our organisation to enable us cause the impact much needed by the world.

Links:

• Women make herbal syrup

Dear partners,

With much appreciation from Budongo Women Bee Enterprise (BUWOBE), and going through all the different COVID-19 lockdowns and the pandemic diffucult challenges across the world, the good news is that we have the vaccine and slowly we are getting back to normal.

Although nationwide restrictions for COVID-19 do not directly affect bee colonies, the bee keepers where disturbed socially, emotionally and had financial limits that prevented a number of activities to take place. Such activities included regular meetings, movement to locations which greatly affected the monitoring and the supervision of the apiary sites in the community.

We at Safeplan Uganda particularly cherish the BUWOBE project because it was our very first grant, and now it’s a two times award winner: firstly in 2014 with SeedInitiative Africa and secondly in 2018 the Young Women Transform Prize by USAID.

This means that we have to continue monitoring and supervising all activities even when we have no active grants as part of sustainability plan of the project.

During the month of April through May, some members have already started harvesting honey for the first season of 2021. We expect this year’s harvest to be better than last year.

As we continue to recruit and train more members, we expect to reach at least 500 members by the end of 2022 with basic skills on bee keeping. We are harnessing the merger resource we have to share knowledge and skills to ensure the project keep moving until it achieves its goals of “A self-reliant Woman” able to take care of themselves without fully relying on spouse or external support.

We have seen the outcome, other self-help groups from neighboring villages have started showing interest and we are supporting them with few hours of training so as to get them ready for bee keeping.

Kigaju forest camp is a private forest reserve is such community which have requested for our support to train the community to harness the privileges of living near the forest to keep bees while protecting the forest resources. This is expanding the need for our work and bringing value to Safeplan Uganda organization.

We very much continue to appreciate your support both from institutions and individuals, we are able to move because you are part of our initiative.

To learn more about all our activities and achievements please visit our website at Safeplan Uganda.

Yours faithfully,

Birungi Annet

Executive Director

Safeplan Uganda.

Links:

• search for Buwobe