This project helps to uplift rural poor communities especially women and youth living in extreme poverty by joining community cooperatives. Kigezi Healthcare foundation has been supporting families to join community cooperatives that in turn support their small enterprises through savings and credits, so many families have joined crafts cooperatives, mushroom cooperative, vegetable cooperatives, rabbit cooperatives, and many others. $20 can help a poor woman join a cooperative.
Uganda is becoming highly populated with massive land fragmentation leading to low agricultural yield and pushing many woman and youth to look for jobs in urban centers in the informal sector like construction sites, domestic house work, young women becoming commercial sex workers; according to the 2016 Uganda demographics and survey 25% of the house holds live below poverty, the world bank definition of poverty being less than $2 per day.
Communities in Uganda have been mobilized into cooperatives, where small groups farm village savings and loans associations, then the associations join cooperatives, individuals can join cooperatives directly if they have the required income, the cooperatives help them to save regularly and train them in enterprise development and help them to promote their enterprises. The cooperatives also buy their products and sell to the bigger market.
Many poor people in both urban and rural communities are developing enterprises through cooperatives, and the enterprises have the potential to grow and become sustainable. This is an initiative that can permanently get people out of poverty especially when production is linked to the market and that is what cooperatives are effectively doing.
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