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Marycare - What We Do
At Marycare, we focus on helping people to help themselves. To that end, we have launched projects in Nigeria to help the people distribute clean water, start businesses, and better themselves through education.
See below for Roger Ingraham's film about Marycare: "Water is Life: Suffering and Smiling in Nigeria."
(To view this on the Youtube website: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFexeMbp_sA)
Read below to learn more about how we've helped and how they are now helping themselves - or click on a link to go right to that project:
Small Scale Loans
Marycare supports small scale revolving loans to help families to break out of the circle of poverty. Small scale loans empower and enable poor families to start their own businesses and build a sustainable future.
In third-world countries, unfair and unjust loan practices abound - there is an interested rate of approximately 20% on any money borrowed, making it almost impossible for borrowers to repay their loans.
What we do:
- Our Small-Scale Revolving Loan Project works in liberating people from the shackles of poverty and economic stagnation by helping families to help themselves.
- With small scale revolving loans, Marycare provides people with a tool to achieve self reliance. We began with four credit-worthy families and gave each a loan of $250.00.
- Then, in partnership with Greenwich World Hunger Association, we extended this loan gesture to 50 other poor women in need of help so as to empower them to build their own enterprise and a sustainable future for their families.
Villagers learning about small-scale loans.
These credit-worthy individuals are all doing well, and they have proven themselves to be capable of creating a stable source of income and at the same time repaying the loan. Some of them invest the money in the palm oil business.
Agriculture
As part of Marycare's mission to help people gain their own self-sufficiency, Marycare embarked upon a project with the Greenwich World Hunger Association to build an agriculture center in the village of Umuoduwa. The long-term goal is that the project will generate proceeds that the villagers can use to launch other infrastructure projects.
- The villagers purchased a field of about three hectares and planted three hundred palm trees.
- These palm trees produce a number of Nigerian staples: the palm oil is an essential ingredient in ice cream, detergents, and creams. The palm kernel is useful when manufacturing livestock feed. The trees can also produce Nigeria's famous palm wine.
- The villagers also purchased a palm-oil mill. Now, the mill processes not only the villagers' own palm oil, but also the palm oil of other villages.
- The palm oil mill produces income and also provides full-time jobs for several villagers: six villagers work full-time at the mill and three on the farm.
Clean Water
The 3,000 people of Umuoduwa did not have access to safe drinking water. Villagers had to walk 3 to 4 miles to fetch water from the polluted Njaba River.
Once they got the water, they risked the very high death rate from waterborne diseases (80% of fatal childhood diseases that kill children and destroy families in many third world countries today are caused by drinking contaminated water.)
- Marycare, together with the Greenwich World Hunger Association, funded a water project for the village. The villagers set up twelve water towers to circulate water all around the village.
- This community now has access to water that they know is clean and safe (which we consider a given in America!)
- In the words of the village's water project committee, this success "Minimized the hardship of the Oduwa people."
Education
Ejemekwuru is a poverty-stricken community where most children stop school after primary education.
Secondary school or university is a luxury that few, if any, can afford.
In 2001, we set up scholarships that enable thirty-four students from Umuoduwa to attend secondary education. Each student receives $100.00 which covers their tuition and textbooks for the entire academic year.
These children are doing well in school and are all looking forward to graduation and putting their knowledge to use in their community. Their test scores are high, literacy rates have improved, and their attendance has been 100%.
