Assisting Impoverished Women and Children in Kenya
With incomes earned with micro-business loans through the Women and Children in Stress project, mothers of these children have a way forward, a way to feed their families and buy school uniforms--clothing their children in the promise of a better future.
Photo: Annie Griffiths Belt for CWS
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The Women and Children in Stress project is an activity of the Urban Community Improvement Program of National Council of Churches of Kenya (NCCK). The project was started in 1986, as "Women and Children in Distress in Mathare and Huruma areas of Nairobi," to help women who had no means of taking care of themselves to economically improve their lives. The goal was to empower poor women and children distressed by poverty and by the challenges caused by the HIV-AIDS pandemic. CWS support has enabled the project to expand in scope to embrace post-traumatic rehabilitation of women through entrepreneurship, payment of school fees for children, and vocational training for the youth. With a recent support from CWS, NCCK was able to expand from Nairobi to Nakuru, Mombasa, and Kisumu (in phase one), and now to Nyeri.
A major activity of the program is the formation of micro-credit loan groups that also include a savings program in which the women participate. The women who have received loans have been repaying and the default rate is very low. In Nyeri, the program will work with 300 women who will receive capital in form of small loans of 5000 Kenyan shillings (about $69.00) for income-generating activity.