2. PREPARED BY GIVING HEARTS UGANDA
Empowering vulnerable communities for sustainable development
Please join us on this cause!
About us
GIVING HEARTS UGANDA voluntary, non denominational, and non political and initiated
not for profit, community based organisation that was formed with a vision to support, unit,
initiate justices and promote community development in vulnerable communities in jinja
and Uganda as well as beyond through .i.e. international level through partnership. Our
goal is to promote community empowerment through building local capacities to handle
HIV/AIDS prevention programs, support and care services; handle self – help and income
generating activities and education for the marginalised children.
Project brief problem statement
It has been found a good number of youth lack free access to associating with fellow
community members, rob of joy of orphans and vulnerable children, high illiteracy level,
high HIV?AIDS infections, unemployment and abject poverty among families, early
marriages and rapping of women and girl child in our community has raised.
Recognizing our straggles against such extreme illiteracy, poverty and ignorance levels,
compounded into deprivation, exclusion and vulnerability of both men and women a
commitment of building our bright future. We are GIVING HEARTS UGANDA finding a
solution to all such.
We are voluntary, not for profit community based initiative operating and based in jinja.
The organization has so far mobilized over 130 members. The majorities of these are
either in subsidiary farming or micro and small scale business activities.
3. Capacity building
Personal Empowerment
GIVING HEARTS UGANDA member activists are committed to challenging deeply
oppressive system, most of which are rooted in years of culture and tradition which
makes it difficult to advocate for change.
Self – empowerment, self esteem and person space are issue of concern for African
Activists. Examples of issues to be addressed will include:- leadership strategies, self –
development, balancing personal and professional issues, time and self – management,
Integrity, accountability and transparency.
Organisational Development.
GIVING HEARTS UGANDA educates on the use of organisations or institution to
promote a progressive agenda for community projects and advocates for fundamental
change. This also includes mobilizing and managing resources needed to develop
sustainable activities.
Organizational in this either autonomous and non-government machinery set up to
address issues such as effective organization and business / management skills, conflict
resolution, strategic planning and networking, managerial writing skills, dealing with
power, influence and authority; records management and motivation.
Improving performance through customer care, creativity and innovation, achieving
excellence in management by improving interpersonal communication, social and
professional etiquette, team work and team building, problem solving and decision
making are also part of the program.
HEALTH – HIV/AIDS Programs
The needs of the Targeted population
Members at GIVING HEARTS UGANDA after a through survey in this area
understand that AIDS has greatly affected the community within this area and beyond.
4. Almost every home/family in the rural communities where GIVING HEARTS
UGANDA operates have experienced the loss of a family relative to HIV/AIDS, this has
brought so much grief, fear and loss in that in almost every home or family there are
children orphaned due to HIV/AIDS, children caring for parent who are sick or dying of
AIDS or children infected by AIDS from birth.
We at GIVING HEARTS UGANDA have come up with a program designed especially
to provide support and care for these groups of people.
In the past many communities / beneficiaries have not directly involved in the planning
and implementation of HIV/AIDS policies which is so important, since the burden of care
for the infected and affected persons heavily fall on them.
Therefore the community needs to organize mobilization programs (where the widows are
heavily involved) that have potential to influence society in decision making or social
Norms to carry out behaviour change campaign.
Stigma and discrimination against people with HIV/AIDS has the threatened the
fundamental principles and rights at the work place and undermined prevention and car
efforts .This goes as high as denying the victims of the diseases the right to property.
There is loss of family income and household productivity that exacerbates poverty.
There is an increase in female headed household and early entry of children into active
employment and early / forced marriage.
There is a shift in spending patterns where is shitted from other family needs to meeting
medical bills even to the extent of withdrawing children from school even with Universal
primary and secondary school.(U.P.E and USE) still many children in AIDS affected
families are not in school caring for sick ones .
Can you imagine that some of these children are;
• Sleeping on concerts beds and rancid garbage piles every right, streets, sewers,
dumps.
• Scavenging amongst human waste and excreta for rotting morsels and scraps to
eat.
5. • Prostituting themselves for basic food and shelter.
• Trafficked and sold in to sexual bandage, even at five years old and younger.
• Abused and brutalized by sexual predators, local gongs, corrupts police officers,
and slum lords.
• Victimised HIV /AIDS –infected men who believe that sleeping with young virgins
can cure the disease.
• Recruited in to lives of thievery, smuggling and drug dealing.
• Abducted to serve as child soldiers or the or the sex slaves of soldiers or the sex
slaves of soldiers.
• Exploited as child labourers or slaves in sweet shapes.
• Executed by local businessmen and official who view them as dirty pests
interfering with trade and commerce.
• Sacrificed in occult and witchcraft rituals.
• Robbed of childhood, self esteem innocence and hope.
Purpose:
To improve the living condition of the people infected and affected by HIV/AIDS
Activities:
• Encouraging the local communities during home visiting mobilization and
sensitization to go for voluntary Counselling and Testing VCTservices.
• Training and Educating caregivers on improved nutrition and primary
healthcare services and long term survival skills.
• Providing material support and social assistance to PLWHA.
• Encouraging income –generating activities for PLWHA and their caregivers.
• Advocating community home base care.
• Supporting AIDS orphans and other vulnerable children.
Economic Empowerment
Income generating activities
GIVING HEARTS UGANDA’S economic initiative is aimed at incomes Generating
Activities with the goal promoting Economic empowerment of the rural/semi-urban poor in
6. the development process. The main areas for intervention in this respect include the
initiation of the following:
• Sustainable agriculture paving way for commercial crop production from subsistence
to sustainable commercial farming
• Animal husbandry
• Micro –finance
• Addition of value to agro-produce
• Skill empowerment and development
Sustainable organic agriculture
Sustainable organic agriculture (soa) is described as an approach to agricultural
production which minimizes or excludes the use of agro-chemicals in favour of using
natural alternative products within an individual’s farm, or in a farming community.
The major advantage of using organic (sao) is described as an approach to agricultural
production ,which minimizes or excludes the use of agro –chemicals in favour of using
natural alternative products within an individual‘s farm, or in a farming community.
The major advantage of using organic products in farming includes minimization of
adverse aspects associated with inorganic chemicals.
GIVING HANDS UGANDA is therefore achieving this through training and
encouraging peasant farmers /communities to adopt sustainable organic farming.
Problem statement
Considering the nature of farming in Uganda and its agro-ecological conditions GIVING
HEART UGANDA believes that the livelihoods of the small holder farmer’s majority can
best be improved through the adoption and implementation of sustainable agriculture
(SA) practices.
Currently the majorities of farmers are not practicing sustainable Agriculture and hence
often face food insecurity and poverty leading to environmental degradation while in
search for food. This is largely due to the following factors;
• Lack of skills and knowledge e.g. what, when and how to grow.
7. • Lack of information sharing and use.
• Lack of research back up.
• Gender inequity.
• Little advocacy in sustainable Agriculture.
• Few marketing opportunities (information, skills and outlets)
• Lack of access to credit facilities.
• Lack of input supply and poor availability resource.
Strategies
The organisation uses the following strategies to address these constraints to solve the
earlier problem statement with rural communities as the target;
• Capacity building for sustainable agriculture.
• Advocacy program
• Lobbing (raising) funds
Capacity building for sustainable agriculture
The capacity need for peasant farmers and the organisation are in particular;
• Production techniques
• Marketing (farm planning and agribusiness)_
• Advocacy skills.
Capacity building for production techniques
The main aim of the organisation is to increase income of the rural peasants and other
vulnerable groups from subsistence farming to commercial farming. We target peasant’s
farmers, vulnerable community members and Trainers of Trainers (TOTs) and will consist
of participatory, demand driven and objective oriented training with the support to
participatory gender sensitive monitoring and evaluation.
The content is based on environmental sustainability, soil management, water
conservation, making and application of organic manure, crop production techniques,
food security, seed multiplication & distribution, agro-processing and preservation, post
8. harvest handing, as well as livestock management market orientation and optical
available resource use.
Within marketing, capacity building is based on a practical and sensitive approach. The
major contents are developing a farmer based market based information system for
domestic and export market, facilitate the introduction of alternative income generating
activities, facilitate the formation of small holder business associations to trade linkages
and research on appropriate and economically viable of added value.
The main focus within the organisational development support is on strategic planning
and exploring innovative ways of the organisation to collaborate and enhance impact. It
consists of facilitation or training.
Advocacy program
The advocacy program contributes to the community employment to actively participate in
planning and budgeting processes at local government level.
This results in sub counties allocating adequate resources for sustainable agriculture
activities.
The main activities within this program are stakeholders’ consultative meeting, awareness
workshops at community level, training local government and local leaders in participatory
gender sensitive planning and budgeting, gathering and information dissemination
through research reports, policy and policy dialogue meetings.
Lobbing (Raising) Funds
The purpose of raising funds in GIVING HEARTS UGANDA is mainly for
implementation of the planned activities to benefit the beneficiaries, to facilitate initial
capacity building activities with in the targeted communities and the organisation.
For long term funding, the organisation will establish direct contact with the funding
source who are willing to support the organisation financially and also in any other area
that deem fit for GIVING HEARTS UGANDA members.
9. Commercial farming.
The organisations long – term plan is to initiate commercial farming activities. This is
basically for sustainability as well as expanding its programs, of which its lesson will be
carried throughout rural areas for campaign against poverty. This ensures increased
income at grass root levels to improve the livelihoods of the rural poor particularly focused
on women, orphan / child headed families.
Components
This includes for major activities that involves the following component.
• Commercial crop production;
The following crops have been selected to be grown organically; Maize, Sunflower,
Simsim, and soya beans, pineapple, passion fruits, mangoes, oranges and vegetables.
The selected crops are processed into maize flour, vegetable oil production/ oil extraction,
and maize brand for birds and animal feeds.
Selected fruits are processed using solar dryers.
Juices jam and wine to be preserved, packed ready for consumption.
All the seeds are tested at the Uganda seed scheme laboratory for germination prior to
planting.
Irrigation systems will be adopted for unpredictable weather to help in crop production
during drought in one demonstration garden.
• Animal husbandry
This will greatly support the practicing of sustainable agriculture mainly in the are of
manure making which include the following; - cows, birds, pigs and bee keeping.
It is the plan to support the members by giving every five families one cow, one goat, one
pig and some few poultry. The methods will be that one family has a cow, the other gets a
goat etc and after the giving birth of any these, the offspring will be given to one member
in the five family team at random until the entire five members have acquired all the
10. different category of animals. This will help the community in organic farming practicing
thus alleviating poverty.
• Micro – finance program
The organisation runs a micro finance scheme to help the rural communities fight poverty
through Micro Credit and Savings Initiative.
It is the goal to provide micro – credit and saving services to transform the livelihood of
the rural active poor into economically viable and sustainable living.
• Mission
The micro finance mission is to economically empower rural communities particularly
women who are economically disadvantaged through the delivery of awareness creation,
saving mobilization and giving out small easy loans.
The organisation will render these services in a manner that will safe guard its self –
reliant and financial sustainability as a project.
Objectives
The main objective of the micro finance is to provide easy financial services to its clients
by giving them accessible micro credit manageable by rural community who do not have
access to commercial banks to acquire loans due to high interest rate and lack of
collateral/ security.
The specific objectives of the project include;
• Providing capacity building workshop for Training to be able to train others,
coordinate and support capacity building programs to manage micro finance
related activities.
• Identifying, sensitizing and raising awareness to adopt the better methods of using
the loans so as to avoid default and alleviate poverty.
11. • Advocating and lobbing for favourable environment which is in line with the needs
and aspiration of the micro – finance intuitions and local community.
• Enhancing transparency and accountability to stakeholders through improved
performance, monitoring and reporting inline with the national micro finance best
practices.
• Increasing access and participation of the rural poor particularly women gto
appropriate financial services.
• Developing and strengthening the operational and management skills of partner
organisations and target clients through provision of financial and non – financial
assistance.
• Developing special projects and functions that can generate income thereby
reducing over – dependence on external funding that is inline with micro – finance
industry standard.
• Providing Value adding, gender sensitive, cost effective demand driven and
sustainable services to members and to stakeholders.
• Building strong pro – active network that promotes and impacts on micro – finance
clients inline with national MF bet practices.
Strategies
The organisation uses the following strategies to address these constraints to solve the
earlier problem statement with rural communities as the target;
• Capacity building for micro finance sector players
• Advocacy program
Lobbing (raising) funds
12. • Micro credit services.
Core values
• Community focus
• Transparency and accountability
• Team work
• Hard work
Target Groups
The program has a positive impact on income generating activities in the area activities in
the area by promoting economic growth through provision of credit facilities, promoting
non – traditional saving and also focusing on skills training especially in financial
management and entrepreneurship development.
The beneficiaries include;- women, youth, and widows and people with small – scale
business in Jinja most especially.
Education programs
The Education vision
To provide quality and affordable education in order to equip pupils with appropriate
knowledge, skills and principles necessary to achieve success in both academic and
social life thus our Educational motto.
Mission
To increase enrolment of orphans and other vulnerable children in schools as well as
promoting sustainable education and living in literate community.
Objective
• Provide quality but affordable education.
• Prepare pupil to God fearing
13. • Molding pupil to respect one and others. To set up academic standard to fit the
competitive education environment through quality teaching, debates discussions,
seminars and quiz, so that a child can develop sound and logical reasoning.
• Ensuring that a pupil who goes through GIVING HEARTS UGANDA can attain
skills, which can help him or her later to live self reliantly.
The Need
GIVING HEARTS UGANDA from 2010 to date has 163 needy orphans of AIDS and
other vulnerable children in the community.
This leave the rest of the destitute children without hope and the suffering continue due to
limited resource. Some are in primary and secondary education.
There is great need for the organisation to plan in providing them wit accommodation,
meals, scholastic materials, medical care, bedding, school uniforms and sanitation
package.
Adult Education
The organisation supports the middle age group of adults who never continued with their
education and to have adult classed as well to help the aged who did not get a chance to
go to school, at least so they can learn to read and write through this program.
Challenges
• High vulnerableility among children being left behind by their dying parents.
• Increased number of children demanding / wanting our support and care.
• Lack of funds and limited source of income for furthering organization plans.
• The majority of the community are still living in absolute poverty (below poverty
line).
VOLUNTEERING WITH GIVING HEARTS UGANDA
GIVING HEARTS UGANDA VOLUNTEER OPPORTINUTIES
We have got number of opportunities for volunteers from all parts of the world. Our short
term volunteers stay with us for a period of less than on week to 3 months.
14. For those willing to serve on long term, we have opportunities that run for a period of
between six months to 12 months (one year). We are glad to host any of the two
categories that are willing to come and we serve those that need help most.
Our volunteers are attached to our Africa host families to enable them have a broader
exposure of the African way of life style.
Volunteers need not any theological qualifications but need openness of heart and mind
having flexibility to serve as need arises. We have opportunities for lovers of children who
desire to share their lives with our children in our community. Volunteers here can use
their professions as advantages, but not specific prior training is required. This category
includes sponsors. `
Professionals such as dentists, nurses, and primary heal care workers, construction
workers, graphic designers, accountants, administrators, etc.
Evangelists, pastors, sheikhs, teachers, and all who desire to share faith with others. We
have plenty of room for all.
Our volunteers during their free time are given an opportunity to tour the
Queen Elizabeth National Game Park, Sipi falls, the great east African rift
valley, the source of the river Nile, Kayaking, forest trekking, gorilla, up
sailing, and watching all the beautiful sceneries of our country through our
organization.
We welcome you to volunteer with GIVING HEARTS UGANDA
GIVING HEARTS UGANDA couldn’t do all it does for the needy livelihoods in Uganda
without the work of external support of people in and outside Uganda. We seek more
15. volunteers both individuals and organization volunteers from U.S, Canada, Europe and
many other parts of the world. We are currently seeking volunteers of all areas of their
interest/ specialization and ability, for as long as you are within our framework of
operation. Simply inform us about it at……………………………………….and we shall
respond positively!
We at GIVING HEARTS UGANDA host volunteers throughout the year from all walks
of life irrespective of gender, race, faith, age economic status and backgrounds because
their effort and impact is the one which counts a lot.
Our intending should fill in an application form on request and send it back to us for
confirmation.
Below are the various volunteer opportunities currently available.
Faith.
We welcome religious leaders from all over the world and our spiritual program depends
on a number of volunteers we are hosting.
For individual volunteers or those less than 10 are welcome at any time throughout the
year. But volunteers coming as a Group i.e. 10-30 have got a special program arranged
twice a year i.e. from January to April and from September to November.
Under this program, we mainly carry out activities such as door – door preaching, spiritual
healing, Guidance and counselling services to families in conflict, those affected and
infected with HIV/AIDs, youth with bad morals, schools, prisons and Hospitals, as way of
reviving hope, reformation, good morals and an upright religious community.
Community Health
All volunteers with skills in community health such as hygiene, sanitation Immunization,
and any others are welcome. Professionals are attached to our local hospitals and also
16. carry out home visits to those who can’t reach the hospital for treatment and are treated
from their homes.
Most of our volunteers in this category participate in cleaning of water sources such as
wells as well as rehabilitating them, cleaning and painting of community health hospitals.
Etc. this program is done thought the year.
Education.
This project is carried out thought the year. Volunteers come in at any time and are
attached to any of our local community schools. Most of the activities involved in this
program include Teaching, sports activities, music dance and drama, computer training,
vocational education i.e. art and crafts, etc. therefore any one with skills in the above can
join us and volunteer with us any time of the year.
Community out reach programs.
In our community outreach programs in which we mainly deal with the Youth, Widows
Elderly, Orphans and persons with disabilities. Our volunteers mainly empower our
people with skills in hand crafts, Drama, Sports.
They also assist the Elderly in their gardens as well as renovating and construction of
their houses, Kitchens, utensils stands, etc.
Volunteers wishing to come and spend their time GIVING HEARTS UGANDA can
contact us at any time.
International Volunteering.
GIVING HEARTS UGANDA also welcomes volunteers throughout the year who want
to volunteer with us within their localities or countries wherever they are in the following
areas. These also help in networking our local schools, hospitals, churches, self help
groups, etc with similar interests.
17. Please contact us and we shall get back to you for details and arrangements of how to do
it.
