The Jamil and Nyanga Jaward foundation is looking for support on its Women Empowerment Kall (WEK) – Adopt-A-Widow Project. This project seeks to help vulnerable widows and their children across the country. Our foundation has implemented several projects in Sierra Leone by rendering support to impoverished women, youths and improving the lives of orphan children. As part of our activities, we have supported orphanages, constructed a house for an Ebola widow and her five children. In addition, we have distributed over 1,000 school items for school pupils, provided humanitarian assistant for over seventy widows, empowered several widows with small business start-up funding, kiosk and training, and recently set up a fully supported half-acre community farm for 17 widows in Grafton.
The needs assessment of vulnerable widows and their children has already started and cannot reject the call to help these widows'. In the needs assessment program, we met with several vulnerable widows undergoing severe challenges in their lives. We were able to capture some desperate stories of the desperately needy, which is why we need your help and support for our Adopt-a-Widow Project.
The project is encouraging support in either one or more of the following:
Be a mentor that meets with the widows twice a month and provide an atmosphere for interaction, advice/mentoring and monthly support of Le250,000 (Two Hundred and Fifty Thousand Leones).
Provide a micro-business setup worth Le4,000,000 (Four Million Leones) for a widow with children under fifteen years old.
Provide a monthly allowance to a widow above sixty years of just Le500,000 (Five Hundred Thousand Leones).
Support a widow age thirty-five and below with paid training program from hairdressing, tailoring, gara dying, cloth weaving or other vocational skills.
Employ a widow below aged 40 to 55 as a house help, babysitter, cook or gardener.
Provide income to set up small scale animal or crop farming or fishing business of Le5,000,000 (Five Million Leones).
We have already assessed widows at Kroo Bay and Moa Wharf Communities. We will continue our need assessment in other areas around the country. These two assessed communities are homes to over 10,000 underprivileged people. We have identified over 150 deprived widows and their children so far. The stories of these deprived widows are heart-rending, and they need urgent support. For example, we met with Mrs Yeanoh Sesay, a 56 years old widow with two sons and a daughter who survived only by the grace of God. She lost her husband when she was 30. One of her sons, an ex-soldier, became mentally ill, and his whereabouts are not known. Her second son was disabled through assault; he lost both arms. Her daughter died four years after giving birth to her grandson. With no one to care for her grandson, he became her responsibility as they could not locate his dad. She needs support to ensure she provides for the boy by meeting his needs to keep him in school to have the chance to overcome poverty. She was happy to meet us and trusted that we would help him with the support she needed.
This project will cater for as many widows as possible that we can locate and identify. The project aimed at targeting widows and their underprivileged children who found it hard to survive after the death of the husband. We need your support to make this program a success.