Women's Empowerment

bringing Women together

Realizing that the issue of women in poverty needed to be addressed in their community, Stephen Thethe and his wife Beatrice began to reach out to women in their church to see if they would be open to learning and working together with other women in their rural neighborhood.

In 2012, five groups of women formed to come together in support of each other and to be trained in basic business and farming skills. Some have been inspired to start small businesses while others are better prepared to tend their gardens to feed their families and to sell produce. With education and mutual encouragement, they find themselves lifting each other up.

Women being trained in sustainable farming at a demonstration garden at MMEC.

"All women, everywhere, have the same hopes: we want to be self-sufficient and create better lives for ourselves and our loved ones."--Melinda Gates

vulnerable grandmothers

School administrators at Mahenzo Mission Educational Centre recognized that the guardians of some of the vulnerable students are their grandmothers. These eighteen women lack the health, resources, and economic skills needed to provide well for the new generation in their families, the orphaned grandchildren left to them by their sons.

They were called together and began meeting each week for moral and spiritual encouragement. They were welcomed to check in regularly with the nurse at the school for the sake of their own health. They began to practice table banking, a sort of village credit union, giving a small amount per week and keeping careful records so that they are able to borrow from the collected savings for some basic needs.

Through some other money that came available through Mahenzo, they have had some small opportunities for improvements in their nutrition and their livelihoods. Because of their age and health issues, their sustenance farming has become difficult for them so they are experimenting with poultry-keeping and raising goats through these funds. When the resources allow, a few meals of improved nutrition are made available as well. They buy two types of beans, groundnuts, maize (corn), rice, sorghum and wheat. Together they clean and winnow these seeds and grains and have them ground into flour at a nearby mill. Each woman takes home a portion to cook a porridge that is healthier than that made of only maize flour (cornmeal, the local staple).

Together, life is less lonely and more hopeful in spite of its hardships.