BENEFICIARY SKILLS TRAINING FOR ECONOMIC EMPOWERMENT
Since 2018, Alliance for Children and Youth Uganda in partnership with Baylor Uganda has been working to strengthen community engagement towards achieving the UNAIDS 95-95-95 targets and ensuring delivery of quality HIV/TB and psycho social services along the continuum of OVC care and treatment.
Between Feb 2019 and March 2020, we supported and served 1332 OVC’s and 209 caregivers with 3 or more core program areas, supported 2047 pregnant mothers to access Antenatal care services and 135 presumptive TB cases referred to the health facilities.
Despite the numerous interventions among our target beneficiaries, poverty has remained one of the contributing factors to continued state of vulnerability among the households we serve, Most of our caregivers on our OVC program are still challenged with poverty which is brought about lack of an income generating activity, this has led to continuous poor feeding hence un suppression of children and caregivers on ART.
In bid to solve this problem and ensure OVC and Caregivers suppress and consequently graduate from the OVC program, Alliance for children and youth Uganda organized a hands on shopping basket training of all caregivers and some OVC who were able to take part. This was aimed to ensure that each beneficiary has at least a skill that will help them earn a living which will in long run would strengthen them economically.
Beneficiaries in the four target sub counties were organized in groups as per their area of origin, they were trained and later after the training they were given startup kits to have them started with this skills activity. We are hopeful that the trained clustered members will be able to utilise the learnt skill, make enough shopping baskets to meet the available market demand. With the money from the sales, they can be able to buy more materials, save and support their group and household needs.