OUR CURRENT PROJECTS

Mama Biashara has, to date, micro financed and supported around 50 small businesses for HIV+ women, alone with families to support. Just £25 will start a business selling vegetables or second hand clothes, £30 will set up a charcoal seller or a chappati maker. Having their own business transforms the lives of these women – it makes them independent, able to feed and house their families. And, more than that, the psychological and emotional lift it gives them is as good as medicine!

D.E.C.E.I.P. (Dagoretti Early Child Intervention and Education Project)

Mama : Felista

DECIEP – and more specifically Felista Kibe – is what has kept Mama Biashara in Kenya. And now, Mama Biashara’s biggest project ever Is the attempt to build a home for DECEIP.

This project has been rescuing, feeding, caring for and loving orphaned and abandoned children. It is the work of Felista Kibe, a woman, herself from the slums, who has made these children her life’s work. She has been doing this for over 10 years and I have been involved for 5.

There are now 50 children being cared for there, including a I year old HIV+ boy called Hiram, who was found covered in mud and excrement as a newborn in a rural village where the locals feared to touch him because to do so would infect them with HIV…

The most recent arrival is Jane, a girl from the project in Juja (see below). Jane is 12 and has a 10 month old baby, the result of rape. Both are blossoming at DECIEP. And receiving the medical help they need.

The land for the build is already bought. And a well dug. The Japanese Embassy is considering building a new structure to house and educate the children. In the meanwhile, the crippling rent in their current home means that getting out of there and onto the new land is THE priority.

Funds are currently being raised to do a temporary construction (plans and details of which are available to see). This will cost a maximum of £6,000

 

Through Mama Biashara, Gallagher Securities – the inventors and world leaders of electric fencing systems has generously funded the purchase and repair of a pick-up truck which will be used to sell water from DECIEP’s well. The income generated by this will go a long way to making DECIEP self financing ONCE they are out of the rental property.

This was an act of incredible generosity. For more information about this donation and all it will make possible see our NEWS page.

 

Gallagher’s has also agreed to provide its state of the art security fencing to make the home a safe one.

NGONG ROAD

Mama B has provided another small AIDS Charity (ALPHAO) with a popcorn making machine, giving them an income of 5,000ksh every week with which to help run their orphan support group.

WAITHAKE (through DECEIP)

Mamas : Esther and Jane

A series of Business Workshops and MicroFinance Market Days has supported dozens of other small businesses and craftsmen, improving their marketing skills, augmenting their sales, introducing them to new customers and provided advice on any questions they have.

Through these days, a group who crochet shopping and handbags from discarded plastic carrier bags, a brilliant craftsmen who works in banana fibre, a group of doll makers, several wonderful beading projects and other skilled craftspeople have all been able to develop their work, their markets and their business acumen. Their success is thrilling.

The colourful hats and bags in the Mama Biashara Shop are made by Esther and much of the beading work – including the fabulous rings – are by Jane.

The gorgeous mobiles and boxed banana fibre nativity sets are by James.

SATELLITE

Papa : Shadrack

Mama B has taken on board a young man who makes fresh juices and smoothies in his shack in Satellite. With the injection of a commercial juicer and blender, plus an introduction to a couple of big new customers, Shadrack has moved his business to the next level. After a one year ‘holiday’ he will pay back (without interest) the cost of the hardware. Meanwhile he will be providing, free of charge, two litres of his remarkable smoothie each day to nominated HIV/AIDS support groups who have members bedridden and unable to eat solids.

NGANDO

Mama : Janet

Jaja Fish is both a fish business and the heart of Mama Biashara in Ngando – one of the slums in the Dagoiretti district. Janet Akoth and Janet Ogindo (hence JaJa) have been with Mama B since the very beginning. Both Janets are HIV+ and have worked tirelessly in their community supporting, educating, fighting stigma. Janet Ogindo has just discovered that her 11 year old son Michael is also positive.

With a basic starter grant of £50, they began and then expanded their business and rented a duka (shop). Every month Janet Ogindo makes a three day round trip to buy fish from Lake Victoria (Omena fish – the bulk of what they sell; only come to the surface at the full moon). She has established excellent suppliers and gets a very good price for top quality fish.

Having ascertained that, alongside their current, flourishing, market for dried fish there was a much hungrier one for wet fish, they have asked Mama B for finance for a freezer. This will cost £200. And will transform their business and income.

In return, the two women have pledged two days a week, counselling, feeding ( … probably fish) and educating other positive people across the area. Janet Ogindo is also Mama B’s local documentarian – using a Sony camcorder to interview positive people and document activities – and has hours of amazing footage of life, death and the struggle in between in the slums.

They are also at the very heart of FUDAKA (see below)

STOP PRESS: Janet Akoth has just got a great job working in a hospital with HIV+ patients. So Janet Ogindo will be alone in the fish business.

KARIOBANGI

Head Mama : Jedidah

In a slum on the other side of Nairobi, Mama B was doing workshops within the FUDAKA project (see below) with a group of sex workers. It became apparent that the priority for these women was finding a way to get out of the sex industry, while still being able to feed and house their children. After some time researching possibilities, we have begun Mama Biashara Kariobangi

All 25 women in the group will be working together (an incredible achievement in Kenya, I assure you!) in a woollen rug making co-operative. Markets have been identified as have premises.

Start up costs have been beaten down and the project started officially on 19th November.

After an initial feet-finding period of three months, the project is committed to giving a place to a new worker (with training) every month from now on.

MAMA BIASHARA JUJA

Mamas : Faith and Lucy

Papas : John and Peter

Outside Nairobi Mama B has dug a well on a farm which has been dying due to lack of water. There are 4 generations of the same family living there. Water was found at 50’ and a pump installed. The well will provide water for the foreseeable future. Until now, the nearest water was several kilometres away.

By way of ‘interest’ on the well, the farmer will be supplying water to the local community. Currently they pay 5ksh for 20 litres plus 15ksh for transport. With the well they will pay 1ksh for 20 litres. And if they are ill then they have water free.

Once the farm is fertile again, the local community will be first in line for work.

In addition to this the farmer will allow Mama B to erect a building to be the centre of the feeding/medical project (see below). The project is allowed use of this land for the project in perpetuity

Mama B has started (after looking around the area) a weekly feeding, clothing and medication programme for the local children, very many of whom are HIV/AIDS orphans.  The cost of giving 200 children a good meal once a week, with extra-nutritious porridge, fruit juice and the very occasional lollipop, plus basic medications and a few footballs is £100 per month.

Finance is currently being found on a month to month basis.

Many of the remaining adults are themselves HIV+. They also suffer from a multitude of other problems.

On November 22nd 2009 Mama B held the first VCT day there and it was an unimaginable success, with even young men lining up to be tested.

Best of all, out of 50 adults and 10 orphans tested, none was HIV+

HIV testing and counselling will be carried out each month from now on.

As of January Mama B will be doing business workshops and looking to set up some small local business – selling vegetables, charcoal, firewood, etc.

SAMBURU

In the Porro district of Samburu the nearest school is too far away to reach. A small education programme exists there, set up by a local man.

Mama Biashara is hoping to build a small school (2010) which will be made self financing by having an acre of aloe vera growing next to it, tended and protected from elephants by the community the school serves. This duty of care will be the ‘school fee’. My research has shown that one acre of aloe vera (which already grows wild there) can bring in 3m Kenya Shillings per year. This method of financing will not change the area, nor the current way of life of the people. Other than to improve it financially. The community are hugely enthusiastic and samples of the local plants are being taken to the Baringo processing plant for analysis to see if they are the correct type of aloe vera for commercial exploitation. Fingers crossed.

MAMA BIASHARA ISIOLO

Here Mama Biashara is joining forces with a pilot project for PeePoo Bags – bags used as mobile toilets which then transform human waste into high grade fertiliser in three days, after which the bags themselves degrade to fertiliser in three weeks. We have been given 1000 of the bags for a pilot project on the basis that I will record the project on camera.

We will be working in Isiolo with a Street Kids project.

The bags will be given, by way of microfinance, to one of the more enterprising street youths. He will supply them each day to other street kids for one Kenya shilling (merely to test the in principle viability of the scheme). The street kids will… er… ‘add value’ to the bags and will sell them back (with ‘added value’ to the entrepreneur for 5 Kenya shillings. He will collect them each day, bury them until the fertiliser is ready then decant and sell the fertiliser, rebury the bags and, in three weeks, sell the enriched soil.

Money for sh*t. Simon Cowell has been doing it for years…

MAMA BIASHARA KAMBA

A rural project in the Kamba region. We are going to build wooden looms and the locals (who already have the skills) will weave traditional Kikoys.

Then we need to find transport for the Kikoys from the Kamba village to Nairobi each month.