UEnd Blog

Total Cost: $10,000

Lives Affected: 4,200

Dollars Raised: $8,361

Dollars Needed: $1,639

Building on the success of other water well projects around the world, ‘Change For Children’ is heading a ‘Drilling for Clean Water’ project in Tonkolili, Sierra Leone.

They are teaming up with a local organization to raise funds in order to drill 5 water wells in the Romano Village region of the nation. After a successful water well project was completed in the area in 2007, there was a huge increase in demand for clean water.

This has made it necessary to prioritize the drilling of five more wells. This is great news as these projects significantly help reduce water borne illnesses in the villages, especially amongst children.

To learn more about this project, click here.

Join the UEnd:Poverty movement and help change the world with a $5/month membership to U:Powered. Want to learn how?  Click here.

Project Snapshot:

Project Cost: $ 5,500

Lives Affected: 5,000

Dollars Raised: $ 125

Dollars Needed: $ 5,375

Change for Children is teaming up with their partner organization, KIHEFO (Kigezi Healthcare Foundation), by assisting families/entrepreneurs in Kabale, Uganda, who have been affected by civil strife and HIV/AIDS.

This project was initiated as a response to the growing need for financial assistance required by extended family members having to take in orphaned children.

Many families living in the area simply need a helping hand in the form of a small investment for increasing agricultural production or enhancing entrepreneurial skills and abilities. 

To learn more about this project, click here…

Join the UEnd:Poverty movement and help change the world with a $5/month membership to U:Powered. Learn how by clicking here…

Tomorrow is UN World Water Day. And UEnd has decided to create a guide for the uninitiated. Most people believe that their water habits don’t need to be changed. UEnd begs to differ. There are a number of things one can do without too much effort to observe this significant day all without venturing too far from the couch.

Jay Baydala, Founder and Executive Director of UEnd states “Water is something we in Canada can take for granted. The reality is hugely different. Did you know that the average Nicaraguan uses 4 litres per day. Yet the UN says 5 litres are needed per day for basic survival. Compare that to the average Canadian using 343 litres of water everyday. You don’t have to be a mathematician to figure out that is an awful lot of “survival”. The fact is two billion people in the world do not have access to clean water and 80% of the disease in the world is caused by dirty or polluted water. I hope that inspires you to make a few changes in your daily actions.”

Here are some ways ways that you can make a few changes and help some of those two billion people:

• Drink filtered tap water not bottled water
• Flush the toilet only when it is really needed.
• Turn off the tap when you brush your teeth or washing the dishes
• Get a rain barrel and use that to water your garden. Water your grass less or replace your grass with something more sustainable like a ground cover.
• Educate yourself about water at the following sites: http://www.fao.org/nr/water/index.html, http://www.unwater.org/
• Give to a project that brings clean water and sanitation to the developing world

UEnd has a great list of projects that can be found on our website. They range from sanitation projects in Haiti to water for kids in Sierra Leone to a solar irrigation project for a cooperative farm business that is the main economic engine for the community in remote South Africa.

Jay says “it is really very easy to do something for World Water Day. You can do something for the local water supply or you can bring water to people that have never had what we take for granted. The bottom line is you really have to do something.”

Don’t you just LOVE this photo! It was taken at a Change for Children water well project in Sierra Leone.

And now you can give a LOVE-filled UEnd gift with our Valentine’s Day themed gift cards. What better way to say “I love you” than with the gift of ending poverty.

Give.

This post written by fabulous UEnd volunteer writer Cynthia Mazereeuw

Project Snapshot:

• Lives affected: 3,000

• Project cost: $6,200

• Dollars raised: $408

• Dollars needed: $5,792

Sustainability.  Teach a man to fish.  Empowerment.  Poverty eradication.  Education.

We know what these words mean but I bet I’m not the only one who sometimes struggles with seeing the big picture.  How do all of these things come together and play a part?  What do these words and phrases really mean to someone living in poverty, and how do they create impact?

So let’s think about it in the context of a project Uend is partnered on in Kabale, Uganda.  The project, with our partners KIHEFO (Kigezi Healthcare Foundation) and Change for Children, seeks to provide a 2-day workshop on nutrition and education with the focus on infant/child health and food security.  The workshop is to be locally facilitated with an expected 3000 participants from neighbouring communities.  That’s a lot of lives impacted!  But how?

I think of it this way:  A woman is taught how to best care for her sick child through a healthy diet.  She is taught how to grow the crops and make the meals that her child needs to become stronger.  That mother is then provided seeds to plant a crop and shown how to seed and harvest.  As her child becomes healthier, he is able to attend school and help with the crops.  He learns how to eat well and sustain a small farm and maybe even helps his mother grow her farm to enhance their livelihood.  He helps teach his brothers and sisters how to eat well and they grow up strong and healthy, also attending school.  As they grow and make friends and eventually have children of their own, they share their knowledge.  Their kids learn how important a balanced diet can be and how to obtain it.  And so on and on the cycle goes, and grows…the ripple effect in action.

Now, sure, I oversimplified this story.  There are a lot of factors that can affect each step of the journey.  But what we’re trying to do is offer a starting point.  To enable 3000 people to learn how to better feed themselves and their children through sustainable crops that they can cultivate and sell or eat – that’s the point.  That’s where the balance starts to tip and that’s where we meet true sustainability in poverty eradication.

Visit the project page and donate today.

Hi All,

This is a just a quick blog but one that should not be missed. Every now and again the people that are on the ground working with our partners come to town so that you can hear first hand of their work and leave both in awe and inspired. One of those opportunities has presented itself.

Dr. Anguyo, who works with Change for Children in Uganda is coming to Calgary. That’s right. Jay visited with this group when he went to Africa last year and said he is amazing. He highly recommends meeting this man when you have the chance. He will be speaking to a new approach to poverty alleviation, health and nutrition in HIV/AIDS populations.

So here are the details for the Calgary event:
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
6:30pm Refreshments, 7pm Presentation
The Old Y Building, Wrubleski Hall
223 12 Ave SW, Calgary

FB Event link
CFC Website link

There is one in Edmonton the following week if you can’t make Calgary’s event.

You may have noticed as you browse through our projects that there are tabs at the bottom of the page and updates added to the landing page on a quarterly basis. We call this proof of impact here at UEnd.

What is proof of impact? We want you to see the impact of your gifts on the projects that you have given to. We believe that if you can see the impact, you will be more likely to get involved and understand that your gifts no matter how small really do make a difference in places where extreme poverty exists.

Think of a pebble thrown into still waters, the ripple keeps spreading out inpacting the entire surface of the water. The same is true for international development work when done the way that our partners do.

You have heard a few stories over the last couple of weeks. Using The Post Hurricane School Construction Project run by Change for Children as an example, let’s dig down into a project to collect the information you need to make an informed decision.

The front page will show the latest updates from the field- or proof of impact for your dollars spent- in this case building a school for the local community. There are two updates one from Jan 09 and another from June 09. At the bottom of the page you will find a tab for Photos. Click on this to see photos of the project and the community. If the community has good internet access we can get videos but extreme poverty and internet access are not usually synonymous. You will see this is the case here but there are some great photos.

When you go through the project page, you will see that Change for Children’s approach to projects is a truly sustainable community development one; by which we mean that the solution is developed by the community with the aid of the program taking into account local capacities, culture and causes of the issue/s. To find out more about the organization you can go to the folders on the right side for fast facts or click on the link in the project title for more information.

For information on the town of Comitancillo, Guatemala click on the link below the project title for the town name. Once there you will see that Change for Children has several projects addressing different aspects of the local community. This means that Change for Children is practising good international development approaches as they are impacting more than just one group in isolation. In fact they are workiing on literacy for women and children, the lack of a school, women’s empowerment and leadership development.

If you want information on the Country of Guatemala, click on the country link.

For quick facts on the specific project go to the right side of the front page. There you will find number of people impacted, project budget, and start date. For more information on what the organization hopes to achieve through the project, go to the bottom of the page and click on the tabs. the best one is the intended outcomes. When you read the intended outcomes, the field updates often make more sense.

That is pretty much the map for ferreting out all the information on a project that our website can give you. Now do your own searchs on projects that interest you.

Thanks for helping to change the world!

In this third installment of the International Development Series, we will examine what makes a particular UEnd Project a good example of an international development project. The project is called “The Children’s Human Rights Project” facilitated by “Change for Children.”

Lets look a the project from a good project format. Ask yourself the following questions as you review the project.
1. Did the project utilize local capacities and customs to build options for a different future?
2. Did the implementing organization swoop in and fix the problem for the community or engage the community in finding a solution that worked for them?
3. Did the project work with more than just one group of people or was it the children in isolation?
4. Did the project impact the systems around the effected youth?
5. Did the project impact one or more of the accepted elements that make up poverty alleviation work as laid out in the Millenium Development Goals?
5. Were the skills left in the community once the project funding ended?

Ok, now the projects details are as follows:
The entire goal of this project was to work with children working in the mines in Potosi, Bolivia. To stop child labour in mines, this two-year project offered human rights training and campaigns urging respect for Bolivia’s labour laws while they provided vocational skills training for youth. This training led to options for livelihoods outside of the mines. The reality in the community was that many households are headed by mothers, who lost their husbands in the mines. The children’s income helped considerably, so alternatives that involved income generation were required.

To that end, the project provided scholarships to young women, microcredit loans to skills training graduates and single mothers. In this way the project provides a base of support from which young people and their families can create new lives free from dependency on Potosi’s mines.

The intended outcomes were:
•Build awareness in families and communities about the rights and capacities of at-risk children and youth.
•Build economic alternatives to mining for working children and youth and for at-risk children and youth.
•Build leadership and capacity of working children and youth and at-risk children and youth through human rights education.

The project intended to impact 320 youth and ended up assisting 500 youth. That is 500 youth and associated family members that now have another economic option for their families. More skills and money leads to further development in the community because the skills were taught to the people in the community instead of held by the implementing organization. It also leads to better health for the family and usually more education. By spending just under $3000.00, at least 1000 people were indirectly impacted, more likely 2000 for they say for every woman helped there are 5 dependants.

So… is this a good development project?

What do you think? We would love to hear your thoughts.

Cheers!