Project description and Aims

The overall purpose of the entire project is to address the problems that the local community have faced due to a lack of facilities and resources to meet their basic needs for  food , water  education and healthcare  and in so doing make them capable of self-sufficiency and self-governance within 5 years of the project’s inception at the end of 2008. 

The entire funding for Phase One was UK-sourced and raised by contributions from friends and families of the original Trustees and  a number of special events ,  with any shortfall made good by the original Trustees .

A New Beginning is now seeking donations to help in funding Phase 2 through to the end of 2013 which hopefully will see self-sufficiency achieved . Phase 2 will require additional funding to cover the ongoing costs of teaching staff recruited under Phase One , to properly equip the school with basic furnishings, text and exercise books etc , to stock up the medical facilities and, above all , for investment in the farm to improve and increase production of commercial crops and the dairy herd to provide the community with an essential stream of locally-derived funding . No chemical fertilisers nor environmentally-polluting equipment will be used on the farm. 

We anticipate that the Health Centre will rapidly become self-supporting with its income deriving from payments by the government health insurance scheme for each patient treated, payments from private patients and through a very modest margin allowed by the Government on the drugs dispensed to the local population .The villagers will cover most of the maintenance costs  of the Community Centre/School themselves by payment in kind ; some who can afford it will make a very modest contribution to running costs once a basic standard of living has been achieved , in line with National Government policy.

However, the principal source of locally-derived income will be from the sale of farm produce,   some to the local population but as soon as possible by producing commercial crops of fruit and vegetables for sale also in surrounding towns .The key to the success of the farm will be the provision of an adequate irrigation system to allow year-round cultivation of the naturally fertile soil . The present plan is  to sink boreholes at the lowest point of the land we have been allocated  then to use wind-powered pumps with manual back-up to raise it to storage tanks at the highest points from which water will be dispensed through micro-irrigation systems to generate and sustain a range of commercial crops .

All of these farming activities will , moreover , take time to develop  as this is literally as well as metaphorically a case where we must sow before we can reap