Community Outreach: About Katoke Community
Providing Solar:
This rural community, like many rural communities in Uganda, have no access to traditional electricity. Without access to electricity, old women and girls in rural communities spend most of their day performing basic subsistence tasks, including time-consuming and physically draining tasks of collecting fuels, which constrains them from accessing decent wage employment, diminishes educational opportunities and livelihood enhancing options, limiting social and political interaction outside the household. Women and children in this community can walk many kilometers spending many hours gathering wood for fuel needed for lighting and cooking. Burning this fuel in the home exposes them to negative health effects from breathing in burning pollutants and creates a fire and burn hazard. Without energy, this local community lives in darkness, essential services such as clinics and schools barely function at night, and businesses operate under crippling constraints. Our friend organization, aims to contribute to Uganda's development objectives while enhancing local community resilience to climate change impact through avoiding greenhouse gas emissions from traditional sources generated from burning fossil fuels. By providing rooftop solar home system lightings, this project also allows for the use of technological devices, smart phones, computers, and televisions. This combination of solar and technological devices, improve social connection and communication to other regions and the world, enabling internet access, improving school attendance by students and the quality of their learning, increasing study hours thereby, improving literacy rates and performance in national exams.
Solar projects in rural areas provide security and improved life quality
Communication and Connection with Technology
Uganda has a very good phone and internet service throughout the country even in the most rural areas which is under utilized by rural communities because they don't have electricity to power the devices. Providing solar and renewable electricity to the community enables the advancement of communication and connection through the internet and smartphones. Being able to be better connected to other communities and markets will allow better negotiation for a fair price for the goods that are produced in the area including coffee and crafts like baskets. Our goal is to connect this community with economic markets giving them opportunities that will empower individuals and families to become self-sufficient and thrive.
Donating Clothes
Like many rural communities in Uganda, monetary resources are very limited because most families survive by subsistence farming. Families have small farming plots, usually 100x150 feet, where they grow all their food and a limited amount of cash crops like coffee. Sales of cash crops and goods are used to purchase cooking oil and salt with very little left over for clothing and other necessities. Recently, we were able to purchase and deliver many bags of clothes for the children in the community.
Moments of Hope: A Photo Gallery of Our Work
