HELPING FAMILIES TO PULL THEMSELVES OUT
OF EXTREME POVERTY
ESN Bigger Meals Ltd in partnership
with One World One People
December 2023 Progress Report
"There is nothing new about poverty. What is new, however,
is that we have the resources to get rid of it.' — Martin Luther
King Jr.
A
summary of the most recent developments and successes::
Kwashiorkor
Recovery Program
All of the children and infants who have completed our Kwashiorkor
recovery programme are doing very well. One example of this is
Elijah who was a severely malnourished infant when we first put
him on the programme. His mother had died giving birth to him.
Eljah's Grandfather then decided to try and force Elijah's distraught
Father to marry his deceased daughter because tribal cultural
customs demanded that the dead must be married before burial if
they lived like they were wife and husband but were unmarried.
The Father then fled and was told never to return to see Elijah
or his life would be in danger from the clan the Grandfather belongs
to. Elijah's Grandmother was so disgusted that she left him and
she took Elijah with her. Unfortunately, she has back problems
so earning money to feed herself and Elijah has often proven too
difficult for her and that is how Elijah ended up with Kwashiorkor.
Recently we have put six new children on the program and two infants.
The two infants are in Dokolo, a new area we are becoming active
in.
In this new century, millions of people in the world’s
poorest countries remain imprisoned, enslaved and in chains. They
are trapped in the prison of poverty. It is time to set them free.’
— Nelson Mandela
|
Elijah.
© ESN Bigger Meals Ltd
|
An
Unfortunate Rise in Bad Debts
The Russian
naval blockade of grain shipments in the Black Sea last year
caused food prices in developing countries to rise sharply.
Families living on one meal a day were put at even greater risk
of starvation. There were accounts of deaths further up North
from starvation. A lot of our borrowers took longer and longer
to make repayments. Loans that had been outstanding for over
6 months began to arise. Some debts went bad through no fault
of the borrowers. One borrower had a child hospitalised from
being run over by a speeding vehicle. In Uganda, hospitals require
payment for any treatment and hospital stays can be very expensive
and even unaffordable to many families. All borrowers, however,
pledged to repay their loans because they knew what we were
doing and the fact that there are always families in great need
waiting for our assistance. Some borrowers felt great shame
and guilt for not making repayments and avoided us which made
helping them more difficult.
|
Mercy's new business. © ESN
Bigger Meals Ltd
|
Beggar
Loans
We have successfully
trialled a special new type of loan we call a 'beggar loan'
modelled on the Grameen Bank's beggar loans. We found a lady
who was going from hut to hut begging for work. She had no home
and her three-year-old daughter was severely malnourished and
she had kwashiorkor. It took a lot of time and effort to get
the lady to trust us and take a special loan that included money
to not only start her own business but also rent a hut. We immediately
put her daughter on our kwashiorkor recovery program and that
helped as did other borrowers who convinced her we could be
trusted because she didn't trust moneylenders. She then successfully
started her own business processing casava and she was able
to repay the vast majority of her loan in time. |
|
Such loans are very high risk for us because if the borrower is
transient, they can easily disappear with the loan money and we
would likely never see them again. Incorporating the hut into the
loan reduced that risk. Going forward we plan to provide our most
vulnerable borrowers with volunteer mentors in the form of our most
successful borrowers who know exactly what it takes to pull themselves
and their families because they have done it.
Lessons
learned
We have had to get better at distinguishing between the 'not poor',
the 'moderate poor' and the 'poorest of the poor'. When word spreads
around that we are lending the first in line tends to be the 'not-poor',
followed by the 'moderate poor'. The poorest of the poor often don't
turn up. We often have to go looking for them and then an effort
is often required to win their trust before they will participate
in the program. Money lenders often have a bad reputation for exploiting
people and harming those who don't or can't pay on time. The not-poors
normally see the loan in transactional terms. There is no love and
respect with transactional thinking and they are the most likely
group to default. The poorer people tend to really appreciate what
we are doing for them and they see the loan as a wonderful opportunity
to escape poverty that they may never get again. With gratitude
comes love and respect. They know that there are other struggling
families who need a loan so our borrowers work hard to repay their
loans. One of our most successful groups of borrowers even used
their group savings to lend to other families in great need to replicate
what we do. Community spirit is key to everything we do.
During training, we have also had to place emphasis on teaching
people to distinguish between needs and wants and then prioritise
their needs. If your earnings increase substantially and you've
never had a decent income before it can be very tempting to go and
buy things we want or desire rather than need. In order for our
bank to survive we need our borrowers to not only repay their loans
but also save for necessities like putting their children in school
where they will be fed properly. There is also a need to save for
unexpected medical emergencies. If anyone gets sick in Uganda and
they need medicine or hospital treatment then they will need money
to pay for it or they will likely have to go without. Life expectancy
in the communities we operate in is quite low.
|
What else are we doing for families living in extreme poverty?
Helping populations living in extreme poverty to protect themselves from climate
change through mass tree planting.
We want to mass-produce seed-balls in Uganda to
help make it easy for school children and people living in rural
places to plant billions of trees throughout Uganda and Africa.
You can learn more about seed-balls here:
To aid that effort we will focus heavily on climate change education.
We have designed a very simple, but effective, single page climate
change education leaflet. Its purpose is to educate Ugandans
who live in rural areas about the dangers of climate change and
greatly motivate them to plant new trees and look after them.
We’re also designing a new and scientifically up-to-date
climate change education program for schools which will focus
mostly on the science behind planting new trees for the future
versus the science of cutting them down unsustainably, which is
deforesting vast areas of Uganda and putting those areas at greater
risk of droughts and floods.
|
Tree planting.
© ESN Bigger Meals Ltd
|
Using Clean Technology to prevent fuel poverty and save lives.
The world’s countries now need to keep global
warming under 1.5° C by 2030 to avoid catastrophic warming.
Meanwhile, approximately three billion people in the world still
cook using open fires or simple stoves using kerosene, wood, charcoal,
coal and other biomass, and as many of them as possible now urgently
need access to alternative clean cooking and water pasteurising
technology. Also, globally, an estimated 4.3 million people (mostly
women and children) die annually from exposure to smoke from charcoal
and biomass, which causes acute respiratory illnesses, cancer,
heart disease and cataracts. Finally, two billion people are thought
to lack access to clean water, which causes an estimated 485,000
diarrhoeal deaths per year due to waterborne parasites and bacterium.
Please see our solar
oven and water pasteuriser we have designed especially to
help solve all of these urgent issues via ESN
Bigger Meals Clean Technology. |
Our solar oven.
© ESN Bigger Meals Ltd
|
Please consider helping us by sharing this information about our ongoimg
efforts:
|