Bringing Sustainability to our Communities
Into Your Hands Africa’s Adopt a Family program provides a Ugandan family with business and animal husbandry training courses, veterinary services, exposure visits to successful farms and an enterprise project in the form of piglets, chickens, or mango seedlings.
To date, over 2,340 livestock projects have been given or birthed through the Adopt a Family Program. Each time a new animal is born or sold, the income from this project allows another family to send their children to school, purchase basic necessities like food, clean water and medical needs or grow their livestock business.
Through the Adopt a Family program, Into Your Hands Africa breaks the cycle of poverty in these communities’ one piglet and family at a time. Since inception, our longest livestock program, Send a Piglet Home, has provided a total of 860 projects across 18 workshops. On average, multiple piglet projects have raised an additional $268.62 for their family within 18 months of the project's launch. One example of program success is the Mayombwe Gonzaga family.
Mayombwe Gonzaga is 50 years old and lives in Katooke, Lwengo District with his wife, seven children and one grandchild. He wanted to open a business to “improve on his personal development and the community as well.” So Gonzaga applied for the Adopt a Family Program to earn additional income that would help him meet his family’s needs including “paying school fees, purchasing windows for my home and meeting my family’s medical needs.” Gonzaga went through the initial training, learning how to care for his pig, while also learning business basics, like record keeping and marketing and how to grow his own feeds in case of a drought. Since beginning his piglet project, his original pig has given birth to 17 piglets! He sold some of these piglets to take care of his family’s needs and kept three pigs to expand his business. Gonzaga plans to expand his business to an additional ten piglets within the next three years. He also uses the manure to fertilize his coffee, maize and bananas, saving him money on fertilizers. All of Gonzaga’s children are now in school. He requests that Into Your Hands Africa continue supporting the community since there is still a lot of need and to his individual donor, Gonzaga excitedly thanks them stating “Thank you again for coming alongside my family and me. You have changed our lives and we thank you for adopting us. Please consider coming and visiting us soon.”
The Nabisubi Noeline also found business success through the Adopt a Family program. Nabisubi Noeline is a widow and self-described female entrepreneur. She credits the initial training with teaching her to care for and manage her piglet as she grows and has baby piglets. Her pig has had fourteen piglets; she sold ten for 500,000 Ugandan Shillings ($146). She now has five pigs and plans to expand to eight in the next two years. “Because of Adopt a Family program I now have three kids in school and I’m able to help two orphans, who are also in school as well.”
One pig, a handful of chickens and a small plot of land. That’s all it takes to begin the first step towards eradicating poverty.
