1. Economic Empowerment
OPE works with both Women and Youths to empower them economically through enterprenurship training/Vocational Skills Development, agribusiness and revolving loans. We did this in collaboaration with beneficiaries themselves and various development partners, namely ILO through the Foundation for Civil Society, Tanzania Development Trust and Wabia Network.
These are some of Women accounting their Tshs. 200,000 fund loan given to each woman after completed the enterprenurship and Business management training. These Women will repay their loans slowly for a period of 8 months. Each month they repay Tshs. 25,000 as Capital repayment with an interest of Tshs. 5,000 and give a total of Tshs. 30,000 total loan and interest repayment per month.
2. Improving quality of Education: OPE works with Cambridge Education Tanzania Ltd to implement EQUIP PROGRAM in Kishapu district and Shinyanga Municipal by engaging Community in the participation of improving teaching and learning environments in schools. OPE worked with the communities and managed to facilitate them in development of needs assessment and action plans to improve learning and teaching environment in 51 villages in Kishapu district and 30 in Shinyanga Municipal. The program has brought some changes as now village resources including community contributions are now utilized for improving the teaching and learning environments in primary schools.
Photo above was taken during village meeting held at Mwamapalala, Chibe ward Shinyanga Municipal.
3. Child protection/Ending Child Marriages/Early pregnancies in Shinyanga: For the last two years OPE has partnered with Firelight Foundation in implementing a project on ending child marriages/early pregnancies covering 6 wards of Kishapu district namely Maganzo, Songwa, Seke/Bugoro, Bubiki, Buasngwa and Bunambiyu. Through this project a total number of 6ward child protection teams were strengthened and are now able to respond to issues of child abuse including child marriages and early pregnancies.
Through this project also OPE managed to strengthen the economies of 94 poor families and now 82% of them are able to provide education needs to their children.
OPE through advocacy meeting with Kishapu district councilors managed to influence the increase district budget for children affairs from Tshs. 3,000,000 allocated in 2016/2017 to 25,320,000 for 2017/2018 budget year.
During the implementation of the project children were actively involved through school clubs and SRHR sessions in school. above is one of the photo taken during school club sessions.
School teachers were also actively involved in the program and were trained on school clubs supervision and management. Through involving teachers school club timetable were incoporated to general school timetable and sessions were very active.
District Councilors were also involved to ensure enough resources are allocated at district level to ensure project sustainability even after the funding period. Photo above was taken in one of advocacy meeting with councilors at Mhunze, Kishapu district.
Strengthen the capacities of child protection teams was one of the key activity for the program in order to create safe environment for children. The photo above was take at seke/Bugoro after the team at ward level completed three days training on child protection.
4. HIV/AIDS prevention: Creating awareness on HIV/AIDS and promote demand of HIV/AIDS services among youths