From strength to strength

Edward turned his life around

To brighten up your day, here is an update from one of the families benefitting from your support as a £5 Lottery Club member.

Imagine for a moment money being so tight that you are constantly worried about where your children’s next meal is going to come from…

Carrying around the shame of not being able to provide enough for the ones depending on you.

Well this was normal life for Edward.

Like many others, his family were subsistence farmers, growing most of their food with little income to buy things like clothing or medicine.

At harvest time each year a dedicated section of the house would be piled high with grain. Over the following weeks the mound would recede like sand trickling through an hourglass.

A period of hunger would begin as stocks got low — which were sometimes severe and could go on for weeks. This would last until the next harvest, only for the cycle to repeat.

Here is Edward and his children outside their family home.

This perilous cycle is how things were for him until he started to received training from our local partner, in farming as a business.

Since then, Edward has been going from strength to strength. The skills he has adopted have enabled him to boost his yields of rice and maize by over 70% on the same piece of land. He now produces a surplus to sell and can buy some of the things his family really needs.

He has also been diversifying into vegetables, which are great for his family’s nutrition as well as their cashflow.

This is the house Edward and his wife are currently constructing with their new-found wealth for themselves and their 5 children. Iron sheets will soon be installed on the roof to keep them safe and dry.
What an upgrade on their existing home! The best part is, they did it for themselves. No freebies, no hand outs. Just high quality partnership.

Thousands of people like Edward are benefiting because of your regular support, and we can’t thank you enough.