Empower Girls with Income Generating Activities

Happy New Year from Kumba, Cameroon! It is an honor to write and THANK YOU for fully funding our project!! We are very excited to be able to offer these crucial trainings to girls and young women, many of whom are some of the most vulnerable populations in our community. We got things started with our first training earlier this year and have successfully carried out a second one Thanksgiving weekend. I will use this opportunity to update you on those two activities and share with you the exciting outlook for 2014.

Here is a play-by-play, as provided by the CFDP staff, Nenne, in her report on the day’s activities:

The workshop opened at 9 am, with an introduction by Nenne (CFDP) who gave a brief history of CFDP and its activities and reiterate for the girls to take these workshop serious and be committed to all the activities that were to be taught. We shall do a follow up of all the girls after four month and evaluate what they have been doing which explains why we asked for their contacts on the registration book.

Immediately after the introduction we started with an ice breaker, so that the girls should be relaxed, interact and feel free with all the Peace Corps volunteers. The ice breaker, led by Caroline, was called Rapid Fire.

After breaking the ice, the girls were taught how to make soya milk, which took us 2hours. After, the girls drank the milk and were very happy. Nenne (CFDP) concluded with the nutritive values of soya milk.

After soya milk we continued with the tofu led by Jamexis (Peace Corps) and Nenne, this took about 3 hours and 30 minutes because we had to fry the tofu and within this process we gave the youths opportunity to express some of the challenges they face as girls in their community and which we proposed solutions for them.

Tofu meat was served with rice as lunch to all the participants and volunteers with a bottle of drink, immediately after that we commenced with bead-making and with 52 girls, it was not easy because we had to monitor each and every one but all the same we were proud of all the participants and they were willing to work.

We concluded with a business plan presentation done by Ashley (Peace Corps) who impacts the girls with the 5P’s of marketing which is product, price, place, promotion and personnel. This was followed by our newly-posted Peace Corps Volunteer, Adrian, who gave a presentation on HIV transmission and prevention.

This workshop was conducted in one of the roughest neighborhoods in Kumba, called Kossala. There are currently four sections of Kossala, and this training targeted women and girls (ages 18-40) in two of them. In 2014, we hope to reach out to populations in the other two areas and monitor the success of this first batch. With your support, we will be able to continue these training and provide support to these ladies when they need us. I invite you to stay connected with CFDP on our blog and via newsletters (sign up here) for more updates.

Wishing you all the best in the New Year!