Love Mercy

Every $30 invested in to Cents for Seeds is spent like this... Training, equipping, and empowering women with seeds to then go on to feed their families for an entire year. Here is a glimpse into exactly how...  1. Registration   Women who are the most in need in their village register with their local leaders 2. Workshops   Educational workshops teach the necessary skills for planting successful crops  3. Distribution   When the rain arrives, our team starts weighing and handing out each loan in a central location This year we are capturing more data than ever with each loan. Every woman is being issued with a photo ID $30 includes the provision of a hand held gardening tool To ensure that only one loan per person is taken, fingers are marked with ink  Once the seeds are all distributed, women then have monthly meetings with their coordinators and our agronomists conduct fiel...

Anyess (left) and Betty (right) who are our longest serving midwives at KHC A visit to Kristina Health Centre is always an exciting one. You never quite know what to expect or who you will find there. Being an extremely remote area, the Health Centre, which is classified as a Health Centre level 3, treats many and varied illnesses across a population of over 20,000 people.  When we arrived on Wednesday the midwives and nurses had just completed their free immunization service for babies. They were also being trained by the local health officer on the updated Ugandan immunisation schedule. After the generosity of so many of our donors over Christmas, we were able to hire 3 more midwives in January, taking the number of midwives to Kristina to 5! Once they were finished their training I asked our longest serving midwife Anyess ,who has just had a baby herself, if she could take me to the maternity ward. She went ahead of me to ask the mother who had just delivered ...

Read Semmy's (left) story below  Women in Uganda are the caretakers for their families. Our Cents for Seeds program provides a local woman with a 30 kilogram loan of seeds such as beans or sesame, as well as a hand held gardening tool, educational workshops and access to savings groups, empowering them to reinvest their earnings into food, education and health care. They also have access to savings and loans groups that enable them to borrow money for emergencies or larger household purchases. The women then give back their loan of seeds at the end of their first harvest so it can be passed on to another like her, making it a sustainable project while reaching more communities. She can also elect to receive another loan the following year if she still needs to. Here’s how Cents for Seeds has impacted Ogyang Semmy. "I am called Odyang Semmy. I am 35 years old and I have five children. In 2012, my husband died from sickness and left me a widow. I have been part of...

She was an Olympic hopeful, he was a child soldier. Here’s how founders Eloise Wellings, Julius Achon and their friend Caitlin Barrett first came together to create real change in Uganda. Eloise and Julius on her first visit to Uganda in 2009  As long as she can remember, Eloise Wellings wanted to compete at the Olympics. As a child she would visualise winning gold ­– standing proudly on her makeshift phone book podium, singing the Australian national anthem at the top of her lungs. All she wanted to do was run. Julius Achon’s childhood was spent in the village of Awake in rural Northern Uganda, carrying water for miles for his family. At age 12, Julius was abducted by Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army and forced to be a child soldier. During his captivity, he endured the trauma of both witnessing and being forced to carry out violent acts, living in a daily environment of atrocities. After three months, Julius had the opportunity to run for his life. A govern...