Many thanks to everyone who donated to our appeal, we are so grateful!
Accomplish's recent appeal to provide emergency relief during Uganda's lockdown has raised a phenomenal £11,300! Thanks to your heartfelt and generous response to our appeal letter, we were able to provide emergency grants to all of our partners in Uganda so they could deliver food parcels to people in desperate need.
Accomplish works with disabled children, most of whom live in remote rural areas. Many of these children were malnourished and marginalised even before the COVID-19 pandemic, but as lockdown set in, entire communities suffered from food shortages and malnutrition.
"Hunger has become common," reports Maali Wilson, Founder of the Rwenzori Association of Parents of Children with Disabilities (RAPCD).
Food insecurity and financial hardship have been increasing in Uganda for the past couple of years. Harvests have been poor due to seasonal floods and unreliable rains.
The new lockdown and travel restrictions imposed in July 2021 exacerbated an already desperate situation. Most of the families with whom our partners work now live on less than $1 a day.
Your generosity has enabled our three partner organisations in Uganda to provide emergency food packages to more than 400 families, helping them to survive a second lockdown.
Accomplish has also sent a grant to the Kyaninga Child Development Centre (KCDC) to employ a nutritional nurse in the Kasese district - one of the worst districts in Uganda for child malnutrition, according to UNICEF.
The nurse will prescribe ready-to-use therapeutic food and will teach parents about nutrition as part of KCDC's community-based rehabilitation programme. He or she will also work closely with the nutrition teams at local district hospitals and the regional referral hospital. (Hospital teams do not provide community-based services, rendering their help inaccessible to the poorest families who cannot travel to hospital.) The nurse will ensure that all the children attending KCDC's Kasese clinic are appropriately assessed and referred on, working with local partner organisations and health centres for ongoing follow-up.
The funds raised by our emergency appeal will also enable KCDC to provide ready-to-use therapeutic food for children suffering from severe acute malnutrition, as well as basic foodstuffs for our most vulnerable and poor families, and high yield seeds.
For long-term financial security, KCDC will encourage all families that go through its nutrition training programme to enrol in its Street Business School programme, where they will learn how to set up a small business and how to save and invest money.
We are so grateful to everyone who donated to our appeal this year. Thank you for supporting our partners in Uganda at this time of need, as they seek to help disabled children and their families survive this very difficult period.