Luke’s blog: Romsey – Kilembe link bears fruit
This is an archived news story, written on: March 2, 2009
Tools for Self Reliance’s Luke Caley is on the road at the moment meeting our Ugandan partners and visiting some of our projects. He will be updating us as he goes. One of the projects Luke visited recently was a vocational training centre in Kilembe, western Uganda. This is what he found.
With the Rwenzori mountains soaring up behind and the lush green surroundings of southern Uganda at their most picturesque, the church at Kilembe may be one of the most beautifully situated in Africa. Certainly, the representatives of Romsey Deanery, who work in partnership with the South Rwenzori Diocese leadership to support vocational training in workshops behind the church, seemed to think so. Among their number on the auspicious occasion of the opening of the Artisan Sales and Incubator Units was Tools for Self Reliance volunteer John Cook, who has played a key role, over several years and numerous visits, to get the first stage of the project completed.
The Diocese is helping unemployed young people in Kilembe and the surrounding area to find a regular source of employment, income and pride. Initially, the Bishop of the Diocese said he was sceptical of the incubator units as the name seemed to indicate poultry rearing. However, upon seeing their completion, he stated that “here is a place to raise not chickens, but talents”.
The trainees are graduates of the student training programme who now occupy the incubator units. As well as providing skills in tailoring and carpentry, their training includes weekly business skills instruction from Ugandan micro-finance institution, Five Talents, and instruction in life skills and peer education from the local faith-based organisation, Young and Powerful Initiative. The incubator units provide a subsidised market stall for the graduates to sell their goods and services and will enable essential mentoring and reinforcement of the training in order to make the resulting enterprises more sustainable.
The students are drawn from villages around the Diocese catchment area and are excited about the opportunity to get some real world experience before returning to their communities to set up businesses. I talked with some of them and got the impression that this intervention has helped to give them hope for the future. With ambitious plans to scale up the project to include two other incubator units within the Diocese, the intention is that this is merely the start of a project that will bring skills and income to many young people of the area for years to come.
posted 2 March 2009