More than 795 million people in the world don’t have enough food to lead a health active life; Sub-Sahara Africa has the highest prevalence of hunger. Poor nutrition causes nearly 45% of death in children under 5. More than 100 million people are estimated to be homeless in the world and over 1.2 billion people live in sub-standard housing,
Global average temperatures have reached 1°C above pre-industrial levels due to climate change.
Hundreds of abandoned children live under institutional care and need to be placed in permanent families for a safe and proper upbringing. We define LIVELIHOODS to mean capacity to acquire necessities of life or living, including economic wellbeing in a safe environment that sustains that.
Our intervention:
Our livelihood programs (LP) work to meet both physical and spiritual needs of people in order to improve everyday living and make life possible for needy people, and economically empower them to build a sustainable living in a safe environment. We provide social support to needy families and where possible economically empower them to build sustainable livelihoods.
a). Basic Physical Needs;
Food and Clothing
We donate Food supplies and Clothing to help people in great need.
Housing
We all have a right to adequate housing. A proper home is necessary for good health, many families in low-income countries have their homes in substandard or ramshackle huts and other inadequate shelters that are insufficient for safety, privacy and protection, and as well to protect against diseases and promote good hygiene practices.
Our approach:
We build and repair houses for extremely needy people to Improve their housing.
Child Adoption
Many abandoned and orphaned children in Uganda and other countries live under institutional care, i.e. in Orphanages, Babies centres, and other residential care settings. Factors for this can be abandonment, demise of parents, Poverty, among others. The idea of institutional care is tremendous for abandoned & orphaned children as they are taken in and receive housing, schooling, feeding and healthcare for their recovery and wellbeing. However, children shouldn’t remain in institutional care for long, they need to move on and find adoptive or foster families, or restored to their biological parents where their emotional needs can be fully met, receive one-on-one parental attention, stability and the ability to form long-term relationships, and so on as they grow up.
Why children should not remain in institutional care;
- Children do not receive the type of nurturing and stimulating environment needed for normal growth and healthy psychological development, for example they receive little attention from their care givers, volunteers and so on.
- Institutional homes (Babies centers and Orphanages) receive a constant string of volunteers and visitors in and out of children’s lives, which is highly detrimental to such children‟s well-being.
- Also, in such institutions, the children obtain short term affection from their care givers, volunteers or visitors which makes it hard for meaningful stable and long-term bonding and continuous attachment relationships to form due to the limited attention offered…the list is endless. Our approach is to, but not limited to:
We work with institutional homes to connect children to adoptive parents.
We believe that if children are placed in permanent homes, they can have the opportunity to exercise their full potential, and their ability to form bonds and healthy relationships is impacted as they mature and enter adult life.
Also they can receive parental love and full attention, useful skills, a much safer surrounding to grow up in, while being equipped with important opportunities for a healthy and positive future.
The idea of placing children in permanent homes is „ideal‟ for securing a powerful future for all children.
Climate and Environment
Climate change; The planet’s climate has constantly been changing over geological time, with significant fluctuations of global average temperatures.
For example, Global average temperatures have reached approximately 1°C above pre-industrial levels. In order to avoid catastrophic global warming, we must not reach 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.
Deforestation, Pollution, coupled with other activities like clearing land for agriculture and use of fossil is causing the average temperature of our planet to increase.
Climate change is having harmful impacts on our rights to life, health, food, water, housing and livelihoods and all the natural systems that sustain us.
Millions of people are already suffering from the catastrophic effects of extreme disasters caused by climate change – from prolonged drought in Sub-Saharan Africa to devastating tropical storms, floods, devastating heat waves and wildfires sweeping across Southeast Asia, the Caribbean and the Pacific.
The effects of climate change are already being felt now, but they will get worse.
However, climate change is a man-made phenomenon which can be mitigated.
Hiskare Worldwide is an environmental defender, working in the front line of nature conservation.
Our approaches to protecting the Environment are to restore nature and tackle the main causes of nature’s decline, particularly the food sys-tem and climate change. Approaches include the following, but not limited to: a). We use our voice; We speak to the people we serve about the
need to protect our natural world. Speaking up is one of the most powerful things we do at HISKARE WORLDWIDE to protect our environment from the grassroots level.
For example, we ask people to reduce or eliminate Pollution, Deforestation and other measures to protect the environment. We tell everyone we talk to to also talk to their friends, neighbours and colleagues and get them to make positive changes too.
b). We support local conservation projects where possible.
C) Reduce your waste We run campaigns that emphasize the reduction of waste to make wasting our resources unacceptable in all aspects of our life. Every product we buy has an environmental footprint and could end up in landfill. The impact of plastic pollution on our rivers, lakes and oceans is becoming increasingly clear, having drastic impacts on marine life.
Recycling what we can eliminates disposal of materials and reduces the amount of new materials that would be produced, and up cycling is a creative way to make old items into something more valuable. This could be reusing a jam jar as a candle holder, or using old tins as plant pots – the possibilities are endless!
Reducing waste can improve our environmental footprint. Our campaigns also promote the use of eco-friendly products which are less damaging to the environment.
b). Spiritual Needs
People hurting and hopeless need a ray of hope, spiritual healing and a reminder that God made them, loves them and he wants to help them!
We work with local partners like churches and other Christian ministries to share Gods exceeding love through Evangelism [Mark 16:15-16.], Counselling and other services and campaigns to Restore hope, Bring healing, and awareness about God’s love for humanity.
c). Economic Development & Empowerment
Uganda has one of the world’s youngest population and one of the highest youth unemployment rates in Sun-Sahara Africa. Young people in Uganda (both educated and non educated) have no stable employment or access to better employment, and many women have been abandoned with children and are struggling to feed them or take them to school. If households will achieve sustainable livelihoods, measures to improve their economic wellbeing is key. We empower people to create or improve self employment, become employable or access economic opportunities to create incomes and care for themselves. We empower young people and women to transition out of poverty to sustainable livelihoods.
Our approaches include, but not limited to;
Skills development;
We inject in skills training to equip young people and women with the skills they need to create employment or become employable (Employability). Skills include Web building, Tailoring & Design; Software development, Car & Electronic mechanics; Hair dressing for women and girls; computer skills training, among others.
Entrepreneurship;
We facilitate small businesses start-ups for youths and women and keep monitoring them to see that they grow in to sustainable sources of incomes.
We also empower small businesses with cash, training and equipment investment for women and young people to help them grow.
Employment opportunities;
We connect people to employment opportunities wherever they can be found so they can create incomes and care for their families and build their communities.
Agricultural development;
We empower Famers with Training, Improved crop varieties & animal breed to produce enough food for their families and some for markets to create incomes. We also connect farmers to markets so they can earn what’s worth their produce and create reasonable incomes.