Building confidence, capacity and entrepreneurial spirit
What we believe
At NEMMIA, we believe in people using their gifts and talents to pursue their ideas and build their own life stories. We are proud to contribute to building confidence and perspectives. We have focused particularly on the marginalised, such as orphans, rural communities and (despite some progress) many women in Uganda.
To make that belief tangible, we have been pursuing, at times experimentally, different initiatives since 2009. Some of them are presented here.
Between 2020 and 2022, NEMMIA could not escape the negative effects of the COVID19-pandemic. With lock-downs and necessary human-distancing protocols, a lot of our work had to be disrupted. That is because most of our initiatives are about bringing people and communities together. We are happy that we have been able to return to our normal pace in the course of 2022.
Education for orphans
Since 2018, NEMMIA has the privilege to organise education support for orphans.
In the beginning, a private initiative raised money to pay schoolfees of 6 siblings who lost their parents to HIV/AIDS. The initiative also provided practical support such as advising choice of schools, handling money transfers (in the past even more tedious than nowadays, when still not all schools have an account to transfer to from anywhere!). As the 6 siblings progressed well, the initiators turned to NEMMIA to continue the support role.
What we learned: Find two blogposts here and here.
Building on the success and network, NEMMIA was able to enrol further orphans: From 2019 to 2022, two girls received funding to complete vocational certificates as beauticians/ hairdressers.
Other NEMMIA Initiatives
"Every five seconds, one person gets blind while every minute, a child gets blind; yet 75% of this blindness is avoidable." (The Observer, Ugandan Newspaper, 2012)
There is no regular eye-testing for the youth in most African countries. Eye-problems go unnoticed. Easily rectifiable eye problems are not rectified, and often become serious and/ or chronic. In 2017 and 2018, NEMMIA organised eye-testing-days at rural schools. Pupils as well as the community at large were invited to have their eyes tested. About 19% of pupils had permanent but easily rectifiable eye-problems (short- or far-sightedness).
What we learned: An eye-testing day costs about 1.50 Euro per pupil. (transport and equipment of eye-testing personnel, e. g. optician, and medics to provide advise about problems detected.) Providing a far- or shortsighted pupil with glasses costs about 4 Euro. (a child between 7 and 17 can use such a glass for about 2 years.). One none-profit specialising in providing glasses is OneDollarGlassses
Since 2018, NEMMIA mobilised 2 groups of (mostly) rural women to promote joint savings. Moreover, in early 2019, NEMMIA organised a 1-day-entrepreneurship training for these women.
What we learned: Raising awareness for long-term perspectives is relevant and opens minds to their own potential to build-up usefully large amounts
even from small savings. A challenge is the save-keeping of the saved money - banks are far away, high amounts of cash may attract theft either from within or from outside. The latter are the
rationale for Bank of Uganda to carefully regulate any savings activity that steps outside the group handling their own funds.