Good prospects for young women from the slums

The project promotes school and vocational training measures for girls and young women in precarious situations (HIV positive, AIDS orphans, forcibly married, offenders, widows). The aim is to reduce the poverty of the women and give them a chance for a better future. This is made possible through medical and psychological care and prevention and education work on HIV/AIDS for infected participants. In addition, computer courses expand the women's opportunities to gain qualifications.

The effects of the famine catastrophe in East Africa also hit several of our projects in 2011. Rose Kasina reported on a particularly dramatic case from the AIDS orphan project in Achor Valley, the "Hosea House of Hope", which has so far offered 24 HIV-positive girls a home and the chance of schooling. Moreover, when the cost of living and school fees began to explode in 2011, the American organisation that had previously supported the project withdrew without notice. As there was initially no prospect of other funding, Rose Kasina was forced to literally throw the girls out the door.

Spontaneously, the campaign first provided 5,000 € so that the Hosea Home could continue to work and the school attendance of the orphans was secured. Then, together with Rose Kasina, with whom we have been working successfully and trustingly in various projects for years, we looked for a longer-term solution. The project now provides long-term support for girls and young women infected with HIV and offers them a perspective for the future. We agreed on a longer-term cooperation with the Kenyan NGO Achor Valley Ministries (now: Achor Valley Project). Achor Valley Project's main field of work is community development in the slums of Nairobi. The NGO works together with governmental and private institutions and organisations. Its work focuses on poverty reduction through targeted school and vocational training measures for women and mothers who have committed crimes, support in school attendance for AIDS orphans and needy children, economic empowerment of women (ex-prisoners, HIV victims, widows) through income-generating measures, microcredits and "training on the job".