This project empowers widows/widowers, youth, people living with disabilities, child headed household heads and people living with HIV/AIDS in the rural communities of western Kenya through the excavation of fish ponds, trainings in entrepreneurship, management skills, life skills and micro-finance. The group owns fish ponds jointly and individually thus ensuring that the community can fully enjoy the economies of scale due to having large numbers which form cluster groups for table banking.
Matungu sub county has an area of 275.9 sq km and a population of 146,563 people as per the 2009 population and housing census. It depended solely on sugar cane plantation for sale to the giant Mumias Sugar Company as a cash crop to defray expenses for basic life necessities. However, in the recent past the firm has been faced with financial woes leading to farmers uprooting sugar cane due to non payment and thus escalating the levels of poverty and inability for households to meet basic needs
This project has trained 200 trainers of others in enterprise development, life skills, marketing, micro entrepreneurship, Emerging issues and compacting the effects and impacts caused by HIV/AIDS scourge. In addition, the project owns 8 fish ponds jointly and 25 members have individual ponds. A monthly members meeting in which issues of stewardship, microcredit, table banking and social development are discussed whereas members invest 10% of proceeds in order to create more ponds for income.
Currently, the project has created 20 fish ponds and trained 200 household heads on fish farming. This project will train another 200 people on fish farming and create 50 fish ponds that can rear 1000 mono sex fish that will be stocked and will be provided with fish feeds that can last up t harvesting tim. Widows and the youth will engage in a microcredit project to enable investments in small businesses that will compliment the efforts of fish farming since the venture is not labour intensive.
