Participants in CARE’s Gender Equity for Women Farmers in Mozambique project. Photo by Josh Estey.
By BGR Staff
At Buddhist Global Relief’s annual projects meeting, held on April 27–28, the BGR board approved 59 projects for the next fiscal year, running from July 1, 2024 through June 30, 2025. These include three projects with new partners as follows.
Hunger relief for children in Haiti
A project with Hope for Haiti will provide emergency nutrition support to children in southern Haiti. Families in Haiti’s Sud and Nippes Departments face significant economic barriers to accessing nutritious food as well as both economic and geographic barriers to health care access. The project will provide nutritional supplements and pediatric care to 5,000 infants and children under 5 who are suffering from malnutrition or who are at risk of malnutrition. In addition to its ongoing work providing primary pediatric care and nutrition from its Infirmary St. Etienne in Les Cayes, Hope for Haiti also conducts weekly mobile clinics in remote communities and provides financial and logistical support for families whose children require advanced care at other facilities.
Nutritional and educational support for HIV/AIDS orphans in Tanzania
The ”Save Their Dreams” project of Mercy World Organization (MEWO) is responding to the crisis surrounding the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Tanzania. Approximately 860,000 children and youth here are orphans because of this disease. Because of the stigmatization of HIV/AIDS by society, many of these children end up living on the streets, where they are vulnerable to sexual abuse or exploitation by drug dealers. Other children have been taken in by caregivers who struggle to provide sufficient food, education, and health care. This project will supply school lunches and educational materials, health care, and counseling to 31 orphans in Mbeya who have been taken in by under-resourced caregivers, who also receive food and support from MEWO.
Training in environmentally sustainable agriculture methods in Kenya
New BGR partner Farmers Alliance for Restoration (FAR) has developed a project to provide training to farmers in Kisumu West, Kenya, based on the holistic agricultural method called permaculture. This encompasses training in agroecological farming techniques, farmer-to-farmer information sharing, nutrition education, and community-building. This project will train 300 farmers through peer-to-peer methods; the lead farmers will also be an ongoing resource for their communities. The project will improve nutrition and dietary diversity for 1,500 indirect beneficiaries in the farmers’ families by improving yield and diversifying production through sustainable agricultural methods and increasing household incomes through marketing training. The project’s focus on sustainable agriculture methods will also strengthen community resilience to climate change and environmental crises.
A FAR trainer instructs farmers in permaculture methods for growing climate-resilient sweet potato crops.
These excellent initiatives from our new partners will join 56 other BGR-supported projects to serve people in need in 21 countries. In alignment with BGR’s mission, these projects provide food, children’s education, women’s vocational training and support, and sustainable agriculture instruction and resources in communities around the world.
New projects from existing partners include:
- A scholarship program with CAMFED providing material support and supplies for 200 underserved young women in the poorest, most marginalized rural communities in Tanzania, a nation where an estimated 87 percent of children do not have access to secondary school;
- A hunger relief program with Sahuarita Food Bank providing nutritional food each week to 46 very low-income households with children ages 0 to 5 years in a community in Pima County, Arizona, where 88 percent of elementary-school children qualify for reduced-price lunch programs and many live without electricity or water;
- A women’s livelihood project with CARE designed to improve the lives of 560 women farmers in Mozambique and their families through women-led farmer field business schools providing training focused on sustainable livelihood diversification, climate-smart agriculture, and gender equity;
- A vocational training program with Karuna Trust providing training in information and communication technology, as well as needed school meals, to 120 high-school students and 40 school leavers in the remote Padaviya division in Sri Lanka, where access to computer labs is severely limited;
- A women’s empowerment program from Rosary Prayer Society providing training in tailoring and embroidery and entrepreneurial support to 450 adolescent girls, disadvantaged and sexually abused women, and widows in Andhra Pradesh, India;
- A multisectoral initiative with Action Against Hunger to address the underlying causes of childhood, adolescent, and maternal undernutrition for 22,000 people in the Dodoma and Singida regions of Tanzania through community initiatives to improve agricultural production, sustain school feeding programs, and improve dietary diversification at household and individual levels.
These projects are made possible by the generosity of Buddhist Global Relief’s community of supporters. All of us at BGR are grateful for each and every one of you for supporting our work to relieve the suffering of chronic hunger and poverty worldwide.
