Community Knowledge Worker (CKW) initiative

You are helping to bring grassroots change across Uganda – thank you so much for your support! With your help, more farmers are getting the information they need to improve their livelihoods and provide for their families. And best of all, our CKWs and the farmers they serve are sharing the information they learn with others – instilling lasting knowledge and positive change in villages across the country.

In the past three months, we have achieved the following thanks to your help:

• Our network of 1,000 CKWs has helped 29,000 more farmers with tips on how best to care for their crops and livestock – which they depend on for both their food and their income. We’ve now reached 168,000 farmers since the start of our project.
• Our CKWs have reached farmers in 2,750 more villages since December 2012 – for a total of 17,750 villages reached since the beginning of our initiative.
• Since the start of the project, our CKWs have had more than 1.6 million interactions with farmers!

Most CKWs are farmers as well, and more than 60% are very poor when they start their job as a CKW. The information that CKWs learn and impart is also useful for the CKWs themselves. Shamira was once a struggling banana farmer in eastern Uganda. Then she became a Grameen Foundation CKW – learning how to use a mobile phone to search for agricultural tips, weather forecasts, and farming techniques. Not only did she help her neighbors with their farming problems, she also realized that she had been using out-of-date techniques for managing her own banana crop. Once she implemented the new techniques she had learned as a CKW, her bananas increased in size – so much so that she could sell them for $13 per bunch as compared to $2 before! She is using her increased income to pay for school fees for her four children.

Thank you once again for your compassion and generosity. You are helping poor farmers throughout Uganda get the information they need to live productive lives and reach their full potential. Won’t you consider making another donation today so that we can reach our fundraising goal? We’re so close! 

Links:

• Check out the recent Guardian newspaper article featuring CKWs