The Girl Education Project

Dear friends, family and donors,

Today, on 12 March 2018, Children’s Hope Malawi is launching its first fundraiser as a 501(c)3 charity to support an education/intervention program for the most vulnerable girls in our rural community in Domasi, Zomba.

Around this time last year, we made an appeal to raise $5000 USD to purchase a maize mill to help us offset costs at our project’s rural clinic. That enterprise is now bringing in between $250 – $400 in revenue per month for health services for thousands of people. We remain grateful for your support in making that happen!

Following the success of that program, we mobilized and registered our Malawi-based operation as a tax-deductible organization to help us further our cause. Our project for 2018 is titled The Girl Education Project, which is an intervention plan to keep the most vulnerable girls in school by addressing the causes of high drop out rates amongst girls in our community.

Early marriages, pregnancies and domestic servitude are critical problems for young girls in our community due to high levels of poverty. To combat this, we are launching a program to enlist and retain up to 50 of the most at risk girls between the ages of 9-13 into the local schools. This involves an integrated plan of physical and mental health counseling at our clinic, family and community intervention with licensed counselors, and coordination with 7 specific school centers to monitor and support the girls in school. Although up to 50 girls will be selected, hundreds of students will benefit. This program also aims to support teacher training, provision of books and supplies, and improve classroom conditions in the 7 zones in our community.

We intend to work closely with the Malawi Ministry of Education on this project to ensure its sustainability beyond our one year pilot plan.

Our first fundraising target is $5000 USD which will allow us to start the program. You can find out more information and make a donation on our fundraising site:  https://www.globalgiving.org/projects/the-50-girl-education-project-domasi-malawi/. We will provide detailed quarterly reports on the status of the project in addition to providing tax receipts for your donation through Global Giving.

We understand if you are not able to donate at this time. Please feel free to share this link if you know of any person or organization that would be interested in supporting this area of development.

Thank you kindly in advance for your time, consideration and support.

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Getting together, getting organized…

Mtogolo Village is no different that any community in the sense that it is organized by workers, teachers, families and individuals. It is also no different than other sub-Saharan communities that faced the ravages of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

In 2003, in the absence of a biomedical intervention, community chiefs and leaders met to discuss methods to mitigate the epidemic. They had the passion and the manpower but very little resources. The conglomerate of villages decided that the way forward was to protect the growing number of orphans and form committees to support their care.

Although Children’s Hope Malawi, our registered NGO is in its second year, the support and mobilization for the citizens of Mtogolo is nearly a decade in the making. A group of friends in Washington D.C. met to discuss the ways in which small-scale funding initiatives could pave the way for self sustaining initiatives that would help a community lift itself from the scourges of AIDS and poverty. So much work has been done, but yet there is still so much more to accomplish.

Mtogolo Village has been fortunate to receive large and small grants and donations that have developed the area in a big way. School structures have been built, a clinic serves a population of more than 50,000 people within T.A. Malemia. However, Malawi continues to languish at the top of unfortunate lists… poverty indexes, illiteracy rates and incidences of HIV/AIDS. We still have more work to do.

Children’s Hope Malawi hopes to differ from contemporary donor-funded operations in the sense that we are interested in funding initiatives that will lead to self-sustaining programs, meaning that the inhabitants will be fueled with the resources to train and sustain the initiatives alone after a certain period of time. We do not want hand-to-mouth funding, nor do we want to support the hand-out distribution model.

We wish to work with individuals across the spectrum – community members and leaders, policy experts, government, NGO, and generally anyone who cares – to develop projects that will lead to self-sustaining income generating projects.

We thank all of you for your support this far and look forward to working together in the future.