We are very happy to share with you some pictures of Child Support Center’s (CSC) activities.

After forming a group of the mothers of CSC kids, we asked the Women for Women [project] to train them in different skills such as tailoring, making peace baskets, making handicrafts in general, and how they can manage their income generating project.

You will also find the photo of the garden donated to CSC… we have cultivated and the different seeds are just starting to grow!

Thank you for your encouragement,

Enjoy all, and welcome again to our center.

Regards.
Leonce
Coordinator of CSC

I am proud to present to you our 2009 Annual Report describing our major accomplishments in the past year. Though this report captures the main quantitative results of our work in Cameroon and Rwanda to promote the successful future of African children and youth infected with and/or affected by HIV and AIDS, the voices of our beneficiaries speak louder than any numbers or figures you’ll find in this report.You’ll find examples of their testimonials as you read through this report.

In 2009 we introduced the peer education program to EFA’s Youth Empowerment Network, which provided ten HIV+ youth from five different communities in northern Cameroon with the knowledge and skills to serve as HIV educators in their communities.

In Rwanda, the Child Support Center in Kigali continued to serve orphans and other vulnerable children in the district of Kicukiro.The center provided school fees for over seventy vulnerable children in the community in addition to other support services such as nutritional assistance, homework assistance, and supplemental English classes.The children in the center also received moral support from communities in the US, including the Congregational Church (UCC) of Weston, Massachusetts, through letter-writing campaigns with the congregation’s young members and CSC beneficiaries.

I’d also like to take this opportunity to express my sincere gratitude and thanks to all of our outstanding volunteers who donated their time and expertise to our operations. Our volunteers were essential to our achievements this year and provided us with substantial assistance in revising our website, applying for new grant opportunities and maintaining contact with our network of donors and supporters. Special thanks in particular go to Dana Allen-Greil,Whitney Eisenhower, and Stephanie Don for their contributions. Our partnership with the Peace Corps in Cameroon continues to provide our regional office with significant technical assistance through Peace Corps Volunteer Caitlyn Bradburn, who serves as our HIV Technical Advisor in Maroua, and several other Peace Corps volunteers who work with our HIV+ Youth Network associations.

Thank you for taking the time to read through this report.We encourage you to share any feedback you may have by sending us a message at info@efainternational.org. Thanks to all for a successful year. Here’s to our continued collaborations in 2010 and beyond!

We are together! On est ensemble!

Respectfully,

Andrew P. Koleros, MPH

EFA Founder and Executive Director

In addition to the education program, program beneficiaries receive hot meals on the weekends and other nutritional supplements during weekdays. All beneficiaries were also provided with health insurance during the quarter. In general, CSC has created a safe space where beneficiaries come even when formal programs aren’t scheduled, learning traditional Rwandan dance ,singing songs, or just passing time together. Next quarter CSC will also launch a mentoring and counseling program to provide beneficiaries with psychosocial support services.

The CSC’s primary programs will continue to provide education, health, and nutrition services to children at the center.

In May 2009, ROC officially left the bakery premises and moved in to a new center in Rebero. The new center provides an enclosed compound and safe space for the children with better toilet facilities and a more permanent classroom. Project staff also has a more professional office space to conduct business with partners in the hours when the children aren’t at the center.

Education

In February, ROC paid school fees for all beneficiaries at the center. ROC also hired a dedicated full-time teacher who is now on hand every day to help the children with homework, to monitor their progress at school, and to provide supplementary classes in English, Math and Science. Curricula for the supplementary lessons were written with Rwandan National Curriculum goals in mind and were designed to support and expand upon lessons learned at school.

Nutrition

In January, representatives of Gardens for Health International volunteered their time to help the ROC staff to plant a new community garden at the center. As a result, ROC now has a large and healthy garden of cabbage, spinach, beetroots, carrots, tomatoes, onions, sweet potatoes, and peppers. Gardens for Health’s agronomist also led a series of educational sessions for the students about how to maintain the garden. A system is now in place to transplant the current plants into sacks (one for each child) and to distribute the produce, when it is ready, to individual children’s households. Since January, Gardens for Health has also been helping ROC to design a nutrition curriculum, which ROC’s teacher will be incorporating into the education program in the coming months.

Children are receiving clean drinking water every day from the Center, along with a protein-rich snack. In recognition of the community environment of ROC, nuts and bananas are bought from one of the mothers affiliated with the center. This is the first time that the children at ROC have had daily access to food and clean water.

ROC was founded in 2003 by two dynamic individuals, Emmanuel Ngabire and Leonce Mupenzi, both orphans and survivors of the Rwandan Genocide. Their original goal was to create an orphan center that would support other genocide orphans like themselves. However, as the HIV epidemic in Rwanda continues to claim numerous lives and leaves more and more children orphaned or vulnerable to poverty and despair, the majority of ROC’s beneficiaries are now orphans due to HIV and AIDS.

In May 2008, ROC asked EFA to conduct a thorough organizational capacity assessment and baseline evaluation of the orphans and vulnerable children enrolled in their program. Based on the results of these activities, ROC and EFA International started to work together to improve ROC’s programming and services.

EFA and ROC are now supporting over 80 OVC in the Rebero sector of Kigali, Rwanda. Included in this total number of children are thirteen child-headed households and nearly twenty HIV+ widows of the genocide. EFA is providing organizational capacity building and training to ROC staff to improve the quality of the services they provide to their beneficiaries. Currently, the primary services include:

• payment of school fees;
• provision of school uniforms;
• enrollment in health insurance;
• educational programming, including after school homework help, a weekend English language program and computer training;
• trainings with both children and foster families about nutrition, health and proper hygiene; and,
• recreational activities, such as sports and music.