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Imagine not being able to turn the tap and for clear, clean water to come out? Then imagine having to walk two to three miles to reach the nearest clean source. Enabling access to clean water in the developing world is just one of the key activities that the Zurich Community Trust's Overseas Grants Programme is helping to make happen |
| The Trust's Overseas Grants Committee is run by Zurich employee volunteers in the UK. It recently awarded 13 grants, to the overall total of £70,000, to some of the poorest and most vulnerable communities overseas. For more details of the annual programme and funding criteria please click here. |
| Overseas Grants Awarded 2011 |
Second Sight have two aims - to eradicate the back-log of people who are blind from cataract in India by the year 2020 and to forge strong links between Indian ophthalmologists & their British counterparts that will endure well beyond this date. Our grant of £5,200 will go towards helping to cure blind people at the GEMS Hospital in India, and will be used to fund cateract operations for patients in the north Indian state of Bihar. The organisation aims to cure around 4,000 blind people each year, and this grant is expected to support around 350 people.
Cyan International tackles the effects of global poverty,working through a network of partners across Africa, Asia and the Middle East. They work to improve poor people's access to essential services, secure basic human rights and improve economic opportunities for all. Sanitary towels in Zimbabwe are extremely expensive and beyond the reach of poor families. Consequently, women and girls make use of rags, paper, leaves or grass for protection, exposing themselves to serious health risks. In fact, thousands of girls each miss 24 weeks of school during their education because of lack of access to effective and affordable sanitary wear.
Our grant of £5,000 will train and equip over 200 women in two rural districts of Zimbabwe to manufacture affordable and re-usable sanitary pads - the Afri-Pad. They will then become available for an affordable fee to thousands of women and young girls across local communities. This will reduce infections in thousands of women and girls, and increase school attendance. Funding will also support the delivery of a sexual health education programme covering 3,000 school age girls and over 1,400 women across rural communities.
Network for Africa works to rebuild communities destroyed by war and genocide and work with the forgotten survivors, those who have been left behind as emergency relief moves on, to overcome the paralysis of trauma and to access education and health, and become economically independent. Our £7,000 grant will fund a workplace nursery for 2-5 year olds to enable 50 poor and vulnerable women in Rwanda a year to receive education and training so that they can support themselves and their children.
Renewable World. 1.4 billion people worldwide have no access to electricity while indoor air pollution from fuels used for lighting and heating is a major killer. Renewable World tackles poverty in developing countries by supporting renewable energy schemes to enable people to start up small businesses, to light homes, schools and clinics, and to pump clean water - improving livelihoods, health and education. Our £5,745 grant will support the provision of a Ram pump for water provision in Nepal.
The Karuna Trust - our £5,275 grant will support a life skills project for 1 year for Dalit women in India. Specifically this will support an adolescent girls’ empowerment project based in the Vishrantwadi area of Pune, in Maharashtra – India. This project works mainly with Dalit (ex-untouchable) girls who are usually married at a young age, often experience domestic violence and frequently suffer from malnutrition and health deficiencies such as anaemia. The project provides an holistic one year course covering four vital areas:
1. Essential life skills and rights awareness
2. Vocational skills training
3. Health and hygiene awareness
4. Nutrition training
The International Nepal Fellowship is a Christian health &
development organisation which serves Nepal's poor & marginalised communities to improve people's health & quality of life. There is a particular focus on helping those affected by stigmatising diseases such as leprosy, TB & HIV/AIDS and those with living with disabilities. Our £1,000 grant will support a 10 day camp at Green Pastures Hospital to provide health & education for 14 children with cerebral palsy and their parents or carers to help them to inegrate into family and community life. For many of these children and families, it will be the first time they receive such therapy, education or support.
Village Water aims to help poor rural communities in Zambia to lift themselves out of poverty through the provision of clean sustainable water supplies, hygiene education and training in how to build sanitation equipment, with a focus on self-help and community ownership. Our £3,316 grant will go to support this work.
AfriKids Ghana work where there is an issue affecting child rights which is not being successfully addressed by another organisation. The Upper East Region (UER) of Ghana is an extremely poor region of one million people - one in nine children currently die before their fifth birthday with 70% of people in the north of Ghana living on the equivalent of less than $1 per day.
The project we are supporting aims to provide enhanced training to encourage healthcare and medical staff to stay in the region. Zurich's money will be spent on paediatrics and maternal training. Our funding of £5,200 will deliver up to 80 midwifery courses and paediatric course through 2011 and 2012 training over 100 individuals to go on and treat over 100,000 patients per year.
Send A Cow works to enable poor rural families in Africa to attain food and livelihood security. Our £6,093 grant will contribute to the charity's work in Western Kenya helping the rural poor achieve food security and generate regular incomes - bringing families out of poverty for good. The money will provide 42 rural families with the basic skills and resources to help themselves rather than rely on aid or help of others or fend for themselves and suffer unnecessarily through lack of knowledge and resources. The overall result will be food and self-sufficient families with nutritious diets, access to year round crops, and income generated through sale of surplus produce. The grant will also contribute to buying stoves, tools and livestock (dairy cows).
Zomba Action Project. Our £5,350 grant will fund the construction of 5 wells with pumps to provide clean water for 5 villages, each serving between 200 and 500 villagers in South Malawi to improve the health of the community. Water committees will be established in each village and trained in water hygiene and maintenance of the well and pump. Not only this but the water committees will organise the making of bricks and the village labour for the project. The main benefit will be clean water in each of the villages, with a subsequent reduction in water borne diseases. It will also mean a reduced workload for women and children as a result of saving the time they would otherwise take to carry water from a clean source, typically two or three miles away. Indeed, some children are not able to attend school because of their current water carrying duties.
Dhaka Ahsania Mission - our £7,976.00 grant will help the Mission to support the most vulnerable urban and rural communities in Bangladesh focussing on education, skills training, provision of water and sanitation and trafficking prevention. Hygiene practices are very poor due to lack of awareness, poor facilities and poverty. Defecation in open areas is common and contamination of surface water leads to high risk of contracting waterborne diseases which often prove fatal. This project is addressing these problems by working with the
communities of two Union Parishads (equivalent to parish council) to develop a community-managed programme aimed at achieving 100% sanitation by the end of the 3 year project period, and provision of a safe water supply within 1 kilometre of every home in the area. Our grant will support a hygiene education programme to raise awareness of the connection between hygiene, ill-health and water-borne diseases.
Bees Abroad alleviates poverty in developing countries through beekeeping, enabling people to improve their income and domestic food security by becoming bee farmers. Intrinsic to the training provided by Bees Abroad is care for the environment, as project managers encourage participants to harness naturally occuring resources and improve the local flora, thereby helping to stablilize water tables.
Our £4,145 grant will fund the purchase of hives, cover the costs of training and transport to enable the setting up of a honey collection and processing centre at Ote, a village 50 miles from Mamfe in Cameroon.
MedicAid Africa runs the AfriKids Medical Centre which works to improve the quality, range and access to medical care for the community in Bolgatanga. Zurich's grant of £8,700 will go towards funding the provision of medical oxygen to improve health care.
