Providing a remote village with a community grinding mill will give villagers a more stable food supply, reducing hunger. It also will free up women's time, enabling them to pursue new opportunities.
One of the foods people in South Sudan eat almost every day is a porridge type dish made out of ground maize. Before it can be made, maize kernels have to be cut off cobs and then ground into a smooth powder. In Omilling, women do all this work by hand. For the grinding, they must squat on their knees for hours, hurting their back and joints. This laborious work takes several months to complete after each harvest. Sometimes, families go hungry when women can't keep up with production.
The project will buy a grinding mill machine for about 7,000 women. The machine will grind 1,000 kg of maize flour an hour! A mill manager will run it as a business, charging each woman $1 per month. The fee will cover fuel, maintenance and labor.
Providing villagers with a more stable food supply will reduce hunger. Eliminating one of women's most time-consuming domestic chores will leave them more time to earn a living, grow food to feed their families, and create a better life.
This project has provided additional documentation in a PDF file (projdoc.pdf).
