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 2016. Thanks for your 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 Youth on non-formal skills (vocational skills).
Supporting 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.

PROJECT OUT PUTS
Women sensitized and mobilized into Self Help Groups.
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.
Women supported with goats, pigs and chickens

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. 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; 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