PROGRESS REPORT FOR KAMWE SELF HELP GROUP

KAMWE SELF HELP GROUP

P.O BOX 23,

Kibwezi

1^st  October 2013

Dear Sir/Madam,

Ref: REPORT FOR KAMWE SELF HELP GROUP

The C.B.O was formed and registered   in the year 2007, as a social outfit for the purpose of addressing the various s social economic and environmental problems a effecting the residents of Kalinga and Mwembeni villages. This C.B.O I s based in Kalinga village, kibwezi division Makueni district, Eastern province.  The group started with three chickens which were donated by some members and has so far started a long term chicken project with a total of 35 chickens sold after every two months. The group’s long term vision is to establish a tree nursery where we will plant species such as the mangrove, pawpaw, Cyprus, fine umbrella.  Besides selling the seedlings, the community group will plant some in schools to encourage young youths about the importance of environmental conservation and promote afforestation. 

The group also does basketry which is designing and making of baskets a project aimed at rising money to buy each member a sheep and goats after each sale of their products. Merry go round is another activity that keep the group together. During rainy seasons the Groups rents a farm where it does its agricultural farming and sets exams to the community on right farming methodologies to get right yields. The group members pay a monthly contribution of ksh.50 and membership of ksh 300. It has a 35 members grouped into 7 groups for effective carrying of activities. KAMWE CBO runs an account with K-REP bank, Kibwezi Branch (027040000891) and a democratically elected committee of seven members of which three are women and four men that direct the daily affairs of the group.

Chicken project

We have been running the above named project for the last four months and come the last Christmas period we managed to sale our first lot of 25 chickens outs of 36 at ksh 300 each. Half of these money was then used to revive the groups savings and the other half was allocated to our group members, buying of horticultural seedlings inclusive of tomatoes, kales and onions which will help our members in taking care of the vegetable demands in there families and also the surplus to be sold at an affordable fee to our immediate communities of Kalinga and Mwembeni.

Kamwe is expecting to stock our chicken house come late January 20^th with another lot of  36 chickens  and one lesson learned from the deficit of 10 chicken caused by diseases and poor management will be catered for and hope we will make up to selling of the whole lot without loosing any and we also request if there is any technical support we can get from SIFE as our partners  to be extended to us in helping us achieve our ultimate goal in terms of looking markets or linking us with services or trainings on the named project.

Jatropa seedlings

We managed to bring up a nursery of 300 jatropa seedlings and half of the seedlings have been  dispatched to our members for planting and the rest are being sold to our immediate communities but the key challenge we facing as at now is market and the how of getting the next seeds to put in our nursery’s. We planning to make this a great business of our project since its been realized that the Jatropa can very well adapt in our current climate so we request you as a group to help us in mobilizing our community realize the befits of planting and investing in this type of tree and Kamwe will be organizing some community barazas  may be two or three  and we expect a backup from you as a group to lead in the talks of why the community should plant the tree so we look forward to hearing your feed back about these.

Solar cooker

This idea has been discussed almost every time in our meetings and the group harmoniously agreed that we can give it a try and that’s why we have requested SIFE Daystar University to train us on how to make the cookers and mobilize our communities on their importance so w hope come this year we will kick start.

Basket Project

After several debates as Kamwe and basket making as an income generating to our group with Rope making we found that if we can access funds from the Ministry of Youth and Sports we will expand our markets from local to more even international and we decided to target like village markets in Nairobi and other tourist destination centre’s in Kenya but we request you to scrutinize and see if we can make the Kenya we want.

Note         

All in all we also put our sincere and genuine concerns all our partners of any kind of support they can put forward to us owing to the fact that we are based in semi arid region and rains have not touched ground for the last 2 and ½ years and the state of our members and the community at large is running to be pathetic since most of our members are unemployed class and live below a dollar per day which means they live from hand to mouth. We look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely

Nicky Bita

Coordinator

Cc: Culture and social service office Kibwezi

       Assistant chief Ndetani sub location

       District Officer Kibwezi Division

       S.I.F.E Daystar University

       Ministry of energy