Build an Income

Key Issues

More than 70 per cent of Africa's poor people live in rural areas and depend for their food and livelihood on a precarious relationship with the land. In the rural areas of Kenya and Uganda employment opportunities are few. A quality education must be complimented by income generation opportunities if these young people are to escape poverty, to help set them up with a job or give them the resources necessary to start their own enterprise.

What We Do

Our aim is to create sustainable models for increasing the incomes of the poor, allowing them adequate nutrition and better access to education and healthcare. We give young people (including parents and the carers of orphans) the chance to save, to work their way out of poverty and to increase the prosperity of their community. We achieve this in a number of ways, by: 

• Tackling people's ability to save and to access credit through the setting up of savings and loans groups and working with banks to gain access to credit;
• Training farmers in more modern agricultural practices;
• Supplying start-up materials and resources like seedlings, seeds and oxen;
• Increasing people's knowledge of and access to good markets, linking suppliers to producers;
• Supporting individual producers to work together to jointly purchase materials and equipment, bulk sell produce and gain peer support; and
• Raising awareness of policies, opportunities and support available to entrepreneurs and those seeking work.

We are currently running two income generating projects: Village Savings and Loans Associations and the Buliisa Orphans project. Both are based in rural Uganda and both are proven methods for increasing incomes and empowering communities.