Reintegration for former child soldiers in Uganda

Resilience+ Skills for jobs= Change!

Our story of human transformation with Resilience towards Self-Reliance and sustainable economic dependencies

On behalf of all members of Terra Renaissance, we would like to thank everyone for their generosity and continued support of the program in Uganda.

 Thank you for your love, your wise thoughts, your hard work, and above all your respect for everyone. We are more than proud because of you the members and friends of Terra Renaissance.

Today, we proudly stand behind Terra Renaissance and all its standards for total hope, for a reason for the advancement of ideas for a better tomorrow.

Terra Renaissance promotes small-scale entrepreneurship by training the change agents whom we should now refer to as partners for change on Small-Scale Business management, micro credits, and product development. We provide small credits that help in giving a timely boost to the beneficiaries’ businesses as they can maximize their stocks, materials as well as equipment which have gone a long way in improving and empowering their lives.

Our learners (Change agents) are trained through Business mentorship to help them in understanding and managing a small-scale Business by sharpening their abilities to think critically, analyze, and make the right decisions at every stage of their businesses toward business profitability and hence self -Reliance.

Today we bring to you the story of Francis and Nancy!

Francis and Nancy were trained by Terra Renaissance from May 2017 to November 2018 in Fashion and Design. After graduating, they together started doing Tailoring as a business at Opit trading Center in Omoro district-Northern Uganda, which was not their home town but was chosen on the basis of a good business location, empowered with an initial capital of 200,000UGX/52.63 USD and a manual sewing machine each of them, and an embroidery machine as a group asset from Terra Renaissance.

Currently, Francis and Nancy have grown their working capital and Francis has acquired a Baby lock machine and two other sewing machines for their workshop.

They have orders to make clothes for various customers in their community. Francis currently trains four (4) learners who are members of the community at a minimal fee of 70,000 UGX/18.42 USD per person per month. They have received a number of inquiries from more parents to enroll their mostly young girls to learn at their workshop which is regarded highly in terms of the level of skills and the quality of products. However, due to capacity issues in terms of available machines and lack of space he can only intake four persons at a time but he expects to train even more as he plans to buy more machines for their workshop in the future.

Although they face challenges of social domestic issues, especially on the part of Nancy making her miss work several times and the difficulty in transporting materials from Gulu city and little sitting space for the Workshop, they will not be moved...…Francis and Nancy have bigger plans to put yet more effort in the business so as to train more members of their community. Francis’s highest expectation is to fight poverty in his family and his community at large.

 Having started the business in early 2019, they also faced the brunt of the impacts of the Covid-19 Pandemic when the business was still in its infancy where just like anywhere else in the world, they faced and battled hard the pandemic which shook the economic security and their self-reliance efforts, the economic health of their customers and the buying strengths as tremendously affected during the past two years of 2020 and 2021.

 Francis and Nancy had to innovate and diversify their businesses by going into farming which supplemented their feeding and the surplus for sale to cater to other social needs in order for their work to make a difference, or cope during the pandemic.

 All of us at Terra Renaissance are and should be encouraged that the state of their businesses and many others are slowly gaining ground amidst the high inflation in Uganda and will continue to be resilient ever in the coming years with the discovery of the vaccines for Covid-19.

With stories of hopes like this and friends like you supporting our calls, we remain fully motivated and committed to the mission and strategies of Terra Renaissance.

Links:

• Terra Renaissance's homepage