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Income Generation
Most female heads of rural households earn less than a dollar a day, and less than 1 percent of women have access to collateral for loans. They are excluded from decision-making, access to technology, and credit. When women lack choices, they are sometiems forced to make decisions that tear them away from their children.
Education
Children who are not living with parents, and are in kinship care, often are not sent to school regularly because when families must choose who to pay school fees for, priority is given to biological children. Orphaned children are one of the most vulnerable people in a village. If they drop out of school, they have no safety net, and often end up in cities as street children, or are trafficked to other regions of the country.
How the Program Works:
We provide an at-risk woman:
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A grant that funds a woman's entrance into an apprenticeship, and needed supplies.
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Training in the areas of bookkeeping, business ethics, hygiene, and family planning.
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School fees for her children during her apprenticship.
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Savings plan for funds to help her start her own business upon completion of her apprenticeship.
How the Program Works:
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Students are matched with a sponsor who provides school fees and supplemental food each school term.
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We provide scholarships to each student in our program to attend Senior High School if they pass exams and are accepted.
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Staff monitors student progress, and provides accountability through home visits and extra time spent with the students.
Family Health
A unexpected health crisis can sink a family even deeper into poverty and have catastrophic consequences, so we focus our family health initative in two areas: malaria prevention and insurance. We provide a bed frame, mattress, and bed net, along with ongoing education about the importance of the bed net to each family in our program. We also provide a health insurance card, which is part of the Ghana government program to make sure all citizens are covered with health insurance.
How the Program Works
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Donors provide funds for a bed set for a particular family.
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We use a local carpenter to build a quality bed frame.
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Our staff continues to visit the family regularly for one year to make sure they are using the bed net and understand its importance. Every six months, we evaluate the effectiveness of the program by visiting the families to make sure they have not experienced malarial symptons or illness.
