Help Nyitawuta Village Achieve Self-Sufficiency

HOCAP has been working in the village of Nyitawuta since 2015, and we have accomplished a lot over those years. As the first project report for this overall program on GlobalGiving, we wanted to take a moment to showcase what has been accomplished and where we're heading next.

Since 2015, HOCAP has completed the following projects in Nyitawuta:

1. Trained community members on bee keeping
2. Dug a borehole for community water use
3. Trained teenage girls on menstrual hygiene
4. Enrolled teenage mothers in vocational training
5. Engaged the community in different methods of farming and introduced new crops better suited for the local climate
6. Built a dam for community members to gather and use water for farming irrigation purposes
7. Completed yearly medical outreaches
8. Donated used clothing on yearly basis
9. Donated a Christmas love box full of gifts and food for community members in December 2020

Our annual outreach efforts continued despite the impacts of the global pandemic on our operations. We have begun a new initiative to help empower women in their farming efforts. We have provided them with mango seedlings that they are planting this season along with their regular maize plantings. You can see the women with their seedlings in the photo above. The mango farm is situated close to the dam to enable easy watering from the dam during the dry season.

Just today I traveled to Nyitawuta and we organized a talk for the community teenagers studying in grade 10. The focus of the talk was on the challenges these youth face as they grow up without a power supply that would enable them to study at night. As you can see from the photos below, students studying during COVID and trying to study at night face unique challenges in this community. An additional challenge was identified in that many of the students did not have textbooks to take home and study at night because their parents could not afford to purchase them. We will continue to engage on this concern going forward.

In addition, looking to future projects, we are focusing renewed efforts on building a medical clinic for Nyitawuta and its nearby communities. In January 2020, HOCAP had a medical outreach in Nyitawuta. During the program our partners from the USA- SEVEN HILLS, and HOCAP team met the community and its elders. The Nyitawuta community has five other surrounding communities all under Nyitawuta (Awuikope, Buvikope, Fulanikope, Kpegzi, and Gavikpe), covering about 500 people.

At the outreach event, the elders made a passionate appeal for us to build them a health facility. This is due to the fact that they do not have a clinic and they have to go very long distances to get medical attention. They said it is especially difficult in the rainy season when the roads are sometimes cut off. Their major challenge is that this makes it almost impossible for their women to go for antenatal care when they are pregnant. They also said the major sickness aside from the issues of pregnancy is malaria.

HOCAP observed from the various medical outreach reports we have had that most children in the community are malnourished, and we believe this could be a result of their parents not getting good health care during their pregnancy period.

Seven Hills agreed to facilitate the process for us to get the community a clinic; they have already begun funding the project.  But for the COVID challenges we would have at least begun the project by now, but we are now starting to design and develop the plans for the clinic. We will be posting a project on GlobalGiving shortly specifically dedicated to raising funds to build this medical clinic, so keep an eye out for when that project goes live in the next week or two. We intend to build the clinic in phases. In Phase one we will have a part completed and usable while raising funds and building the rest of the clinic for Phase two. We are also discussing with government representatives in the area, to ensure coordination and collaboration with the government health directorate, to make sure the clinic can be handed over to the government for future logistics when it is complete.

As always, thank you for your support of this project, which helps HOCAP to continue to operate in and bring improvements to this community. We look forward to continuing to update you on our progress going forward.