Hajdo is a mother of five in her late 40s from Paikon Kore community. She was a petty trader who bought provisions in small quantities and re-sold them. She said she made very little profit and sometimes ran at a loss. This made it difficult for her to support her husband – a local transporter – and help meet some of needs of the family. Having children meant they had to pay school fees and provide healthcare for them, in addition to their basic needs.

There were times when the family just didn’t have enough money to afford the childrens’ school fees. At times like these, the children were sent home from school. They had to remain at home until Hadjo and her husband were able to raise the money. This meant the children would miss out on classes, and then fall behind in their academic performance. This sort of absence from school obviously has more long-term effects on the childrens’ lives.

Hadjo says “When I eventually secured a loan from PSH, I started buying goods in bulk from wholesale shops and retail at a reduced price. More people now patronize me and I make reasonable profit. Also the number of times I go to the market has reduced because I buy more goods than I used to. I happily support my family now”.

To see more about how PSH is fighting poverty, and how you can help, please check out our Impact Page.

Thanks for your support!

The PSH Team

Tags: impact

Ngozi Chiwezie is a mother of four in her 40s. She, along with her children and her husband, a pastor, lived in Abuja, the capital of Nigeria. She was an average business woman, owning a shop where she sold clothes. Trouble started for her family when the Government started the demolition of “illegal” structures in Abuja, and their newly built house and shop were demolished. The demolition forced them to relocate to Paikon-kore, a village nearby.

Following the relocation, her children had to stop school as all their available resources were used to move the family. Hardship became a way of life as they only barely managed to feed themselves. Things were difficult especially with her new status as a house wife.

She tells part of the story…”My eldest son, Ebube, could not start senior secondary school after his upper basic school until sometime in 2010 when he was awarded a full scholarship through Oria International Initiative. I wondered how my son who had been at home secured a scholarship from people far away that I don’t even know, I was sure it was God at work”.

Oria International Initiative is one of PSH’s partners in the region that have helped us to provide help to these people.

Ngozi continues…”Early this year [2011], I was shortlisted to meet a staff from Oria International Initiative, Lagos. He asked me series of questions…I can’t remember some. He talked about me being empowered to be able to take good care of my children?s needs. The discussion continued on my business plan. After a series of meetings I was eventually given a soft loan on behalf of PSH.

“I resumed my former business of selling fairly used clothes. I now go around at least three neighboring community markets and I also have a local shop where I sell. The loan is very useful to the family as I can now support some of my children’s basic needs. For example, I have bought exercise books, new sandals and a new uniform for Ebube…our food and nutrition has also improved.

I pray that the Lord blesses my business to grow and also bless the source of this loan”.

Ngozi is putting her life back together, and is now contributing to her family and community. PSH is trying to help as many other people in need as we can.

To learn more about PSH’s efforts and how you can help, please go to our ACT page.

As always, thanks for your support.

The PSH Team

Tags: Updates

At PSH the work we do is about people, at the end of the day. So, in our posts, we are increasingly going to talk about the individuals whose lives you are helping to change in our partner communities. These are the people, just like you or me, that now have access to cleaner water, better sanitation and business microloans to improve their lives. Today we’ll talk about Ajumai.

Ajumai is a single mother of about 18 years who dropped out of upper basic school two years ago as result of an unintended pregnancy. Her guardian stopped caring for her as a result of the pregnancy and the supposed father of the child denied responsibility. She was left alone to source for her means of livelihood and to care for her health and other needs. As you can imagine, this would be a big challenge for any young woman without employment. It was an even bigger challenge for her because of her pregnancy.

According to Ajumai, this was the most difficult moment of her life. She had to engage in hard labour just to be able to meet her basic needs. She barely succeeded. After the baby was born, now with an extra mouth to feed, things got harder. She had to depend on relatives and friends for survival. This caused her some embarrassment, and she also had to endure some unfair treatment at the hands of those she had no choice but to depend on. There were times when she had to leave her baby with little or no care, just to try to make ends meet. This is a horrible situation for any mother to be in.

Her difficult situation continued until recently when she became a Poverty Stops Here beneficiary. PSH provided Ajumai with a loan to help launch her trade business. She was able to start petty trading of grains and fire wood sales as well as other seasonal agricultural/farm business. According to Ajumai “this was the beginning of a new life”.

She rounded up by saying: “I make profit that takes care of my basic need and that of my baby even though I don’t have savings yet I am a happy girl”.

This is the impact you are helping to produce. It might seem small, but to someone like Ajumai, it means the world. To learn more about how you can help, check out the ACT page on our website.

Stay tuned. We will be bringing you more of these stories as time goes on.

Thanks for all your help.

The PSH Team

Tags: Communities

First of all, we want to wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New year. 2011 has been a very good year for PSH. We have learned a lot more about the work we are doing in Nigeria and have developed closer relationships with our partners on the ground.

At Poverty Stops Here, we truly believe that we, simple individuals, can eradicate extreme poverty and this year has allowed us take a confident step towards proving that.

Donations from individual contributors, people just like you, increased by a staggering 55% from around $11,000 in 2010 to $17,000 this year. This has allowed us to raise over $35,000…most of which has already been deployed to improve lives in our partner communities. We cannot thank you enough. Here are just a few of your 2011 accomplishments.

Over $16,000 invested in Ilaje slum
In 2011, PSH joined forces with Hands at Work to sponsor 50 orphans in Ilaje community. We invested $9,000 to ensure these children could go to school and receive food and after-school care. We are also investing $7133 to help purchase a bus that will be used as a taxi service. The funds from the taxi service will help Hands at Work compensate the already enthusiastic group of volunteers we working with in the community.

Loans, Water and Sanitation
One of the major accomplishments of PSH in 2011 was kicking off our widespread microloan campaign in three different villages. Since the start of the year, we have loaned money to 20 people in three different communities.

In addition to that, we received information that our old water wells were no longer functional. We intend to work with the community to fix the wells and implement a more sustainable approach to providing access to safer water in the communities. In addition to that, we will begin working with the communities to help implement programs that will improve the sanitation in the communities.

Benefit Concert, Silent Auctions, and Christmas Party
We have had some great events this year as well. In September we organized a Benefit Concert in Madison, Wisconsin while some of our friends in Austin, Texas held a Silent Auction and Christmas party. The Austin folks raised over $4,000 from their events.

Feedback to You
We started out the year promising to provide better feedback and updates to allow you see exactly where your resources are going. We now provide frequent updates via our Facebook page (Please Like us!); and also via our website Blog. We have implemented Community pages on our website so you can see exactly what our investments are in each community. These pages also allow you to donate directly to a particular community. You can click HERE to visit this page and see for yourself.

In 2012, we plan to take this feedback to the next level by providing you quarterly updates of what is going on in our communities. While most of our programs are long term, multi-year projects, we promise to keep you abreast of our successes (and failures) as we work to improve the lives of people living in extreme poverty.

Your support, as always, is the key to the success of this effort. To learn more about how you can help us, please click HERE.

Our journey continues in 2012…we hope you will come along with us.

Here’s to a Merry Christmas and a great start to 2012 for you.

The PSH Team

Tags: Updates

In this post, we’ll be taking a realistic look at the lives of a couple of children in Ilaje village, one of our partner communities.

Good things are happening in Ilaje. The moral of the volunteers is very high right now which is encouraging. We are currently working with Hands at Work to implement an income generating activity to support these workers in the care-giving they provide for the orphans and vulnerable children in Ilaje.

Favour Afamuefune is 8 years old and lives in the Ilaje community. Favour lost her father at the age of four and has since been living with her mother in the community. Her mother has little time for the girl or her younger brother. Favour, being a very young girl, has faced a lot of challenges including neglect by her mother and attempted rape by rogues in the community.

Favour has been exposed to these things because her mother does not fully care for her or her 3 year old brother Abraham; she sometimes isn’t home until very late in the night. Favour is always afraid to talk to people because she does not feel safe. Favour and Abraham were discovered in the community wandering about without any parental care and were later brought to the Ilaje community school where they have been benefiting from the 3 essential services and receiving care their mother has denied them. Favour and her brother look after themselves since their mother is not always available to care for them.

Favour in Ilaje Community

The community school is really the only safe haven they have. After finishing at the school, Favour and her brother stay with one of their mother’s friends where strong and harmful drinks are sold to men in the community which makes these children vulnerable in the presence of these drunken men. Favour and her brother regularly stay in the midst of these dangerous people until late in the night when their mother comes around to take them home.

Favour now receives care and love when she is in school with her friends and plays with them. The little girl is happy at school and is able to relate well and face her academic work at school. Since she has been adopted at the community school, Favour has been doing well academically and is taught about the love of God, as well as receiving one hot meal per day. The community school is a place where she builds good relationships and it is hoped she will continue to receive care and support through home visits. Favour is presently in Primary 3 while her younger brother, Abraham is in the Kindergarten class.

She still faces many challenges but, with your help, we are helping to provide an atmosphere of love and care that will give her and others like her an opportunity to flourish.

Thanks for your help. To find out more about our projects please check out our Impact page.

The PSH Team

Tags: Updates

Ladi, Hannatu and Mary have a few things in common…they are women, they live in Takalafia community, they are traders; and they need support to grow their businesses so they can better support themselves and their families.

The community they live in – Takalafia – is a village located abut 20 miles outside Abuja, the capital of Nigeria. Though that doesn’t seem really far in terms of distance, this community is really remote. There just isn’t any easy way to get there. All “roads” are almost impassable. Just from that perspective alone, the challenges the residents of this community face are considerable.

Poverty Stops Here began our partnership with this community in 2009. About 500 people lived there. They were mostly farmers (still remains the case today), with little access to clean water, and no access to sanitary latrines. Most of the residents continue to survive on just one meal per day.

PSH built a hand-pump well for the community back then. At the time, a local church was in the process of building a school. This well would serve as a source of clean water for the children at the school. Since then, we have provided other forms of support, including school supplies.

However, in addition to Clean Water and Sanitation, PSH also works on providing access to business microloans to try to help individuals launch and expand ventures to improve the general economy of the community.

On that note, we return to the ladies we mentioned at the start of this post. Ladi and Hannatu are both foodstuff traders, while Mary deals with textiles. Each of these ladies needed funds to expand. They were each recommended to us through the process we have in place to identify potential trustworthy individuals (with the help of our partner organization and local institutions). In the middle of this year, 2011, PSH provided them with microloans for the amounts they required to get things moving.

Women preparing food in Takalafia

They are now well on their way to taking their ventures to the next level and, in the process, uplifting the community. We have provided similar loans to others in Takalafia, and are working on doing even more.

In 2012, we plan on investing much more in Takalafia, as in our other partner communities. In addition to microloans, we will also be concentrating on clean water and sanitation. We will stay with them for the long haul, to ensure that the change we bring to their lives is truly transformative.

As always, we are grateful for your support. You make all of this possible.

Please go to our website to get a T-Shirt and support our cause.

The PSH Team

Tags: Communities, Updates

Everyone will be celebrating Thanksgiving in the United States this week. The origins of this celebration are rooted in giving thanks and rejoicing together with one’s community after all the work done.

In that spirit, we at Poverty Stops Here will be celebrating with all of you…you who support us as we fight poverty in vulnerable communities. You continue to lend us your resources…time, money, voices. For that, we can’t thank you enough.

While we’ll be joining in the celebrations, we want you to know that our efforts continue. In addition to new projects we have lined up, we try to pay regular visits to our partner communities. During these visits,we sometimes find that there are new issues that we might have to address.

For instance, in October 2011, these visits uncovered a number of issues with some of the facilities that had been provided in the past. In Takalafia, these included problems with hand-pump wells, which are the primary source of water, aside from rivers or streams. There has been an increase in water-related illnesses, especially among the children in the community.

Hand Pump in Takalafia

We are now working on addressing these issues. We hope to be able to re-use some of the infrastructure that is already in place. More importantly, we are looking at understanding how the faults came about in the first place, and attempting to minimize the chances of that in the future.

This highlights the challenge that we face in doing our work. It also highlights the importance of a long term partnership with these communities. We work with them over a period of time to ensure that the progress made in the past is not undone because we are not there to help maintain momentum.

As always, you can keep up with our progress on our website.

We wish you a fantastic Thanksgiving! Save some turkey for us!

The PSH Team

Tags: impact, Updates

As promised, we are bringing you more news now on how things are going with the communities we are working with. The needs of every community are unique, so we try to tailor the solutions we provide to make sure we have the most impact.

In Ilaje, we have partnered with Hands-At-Work to sponsor 154 orphans. Ensuring that these kids get a good education is a big part of what we are doing there.

All the children (in both nursery and primary sections) enjoy basic free education. Children get free book supplies, pencils, pens, school uniforms, bags, etc. In the Nursery section, we have pre-nursery and regular nursery classes. In Primary, we have from Classes 1 – 5. Class 5 students are actually being provided with extra-curricular classes (by a community-based organization) in preparation for the Common Entrance Examination into High/Secondary School.

Ilaje Children learning at school

All the children come regularly to school and are taught by various subject teachers. They receive homework to ensure they understand and practice all they are taught in class, and to help keep them occupied. Knowing what the children are up to outside of school hours is important. It can help prevent them from falling under the influence of individuals or groups that would be detrimental to them. Gangs can be a problem for these kids – even at such a young age – so keeping that interface going can provide a lot of help for the families.

From January – June, 2011, 60% of the children being supported by Poverty Stops Here – in addition to the free school supplies – have also received new school uniforms. The others will have received theirs by the end of the third quarter of 2011. Currently, the school has 7 teachers and they are supported monthly by incentives which are given to them regularly. The care workers (who help out with After-school visits, for instance) are not currently receiving any incentives yet. However, we are finalizing Income Generating Activities (IGAs) which will be implemented to help provide some compensation for these people.

To see more information on PSH’s activities, you can head over to our Impact page.

There is still much Poverty Stops Here needs to do, in Ilaje as well as all our other partner-communities; but we know that, with you help, there is also much we can achieve.

So, if you’ve got a minute, why not check out what you can do to assist us by checking out this page. It’ll only take a couple of minutes!

Thanks for your support.

The PSH Team

Tags: Africa, impact, Updates

Poverty Stops Here is throwing a party!

Join us at 7PM on the 22nd of September at the High Noon Saloon in Madison, WI. It’s going to be a great night featuring local bands and artists. See more details of this event HERE.

The PSH Team

Tags: Updates

Our goal at PSH is ultimately about Transformative Community Development. We really want to change the lives of the people in the communities we work with, for the better. While the challenges are common in many of these places, the approach we must take in every community is different, depending on the results of our studies.

We have been involved in a partnership with Hands-At-Work to sponsor 154 orphans and vulnerable children in Ilaje Community to provide them with food, healthcare and basic services. This partnership forms part of our strategy of working with like-minded organizations who also have experience with the communities we work in.

We can report that the progress in Ilaje has been most encouraging. The 50 children sponsored by Poverty Stops Here have been provided with access to these services.

Health Workers with Children

In the last 6 months, the children have been receiving healthcare services on a needs-basis. First Aid treatment and Anti-biotic drugs have been administered for infections. In May 2011, all the children in the community school took part in a “De-worming” exercise conducted by the care workers. This is an important measure in an area where the children are constantly at risk from disease. Reports show that the children are doing well healthwise.

Volunteer Doctor examining child during de-worming program

In the last two quarters (January – June 2011), some of the children have also received parental home visits. A lot of these chldren live with family members who might be illiterate, and are therefore unable to help these children out with school or academic work. These care worker visits provide access to individuals who can assist them in this respect. The care workers also help with children who have no siblings or are isolated at home. They are able to build trust with the children, so they have someone to turn to if they have any problems.

We’ll keep bringing you updates from the communities we work with, so we can show you just how much impact your contribution to PSH makes.

Click HERE to find out more about our projects.

JOIN US! And it isn’t all about money…click HERE to find out all the ways you can help us combat poverty.

The PSH Team

Tags: Africa, Communities, Updates