Africa On Canvas

There's exciting news on the horizon. Africa on Canvas and The Uganda Partnership Association are joining forces.

I know this is a big change. If you've visited the Africa on Canvas website in the past, or you've seen us at festivals, then you probably know that for the last couple of years we have been working with the Enyoratta E Ngai Girls Secondary School in Tanzania. At the outset, this partnership was a great success, but more recently there's been an increasing number of obstacles. During the last year our contact at the school, Head Mistress Sister Denis, has moved to another project in Tanzania. Of course this is very exciting news for her, but it has proven to be a difficult change to overcome for our project here. After many failed attempts to re-establish communication with the new staff at the school, it was time to make some hard decisions about how to proceed with Africa on Canvas.

As it turns out the stars were in alignment, because just as I was struggling with that decision I met Nina and Lindsay with the Uganda Partnership here in Calgary and it was a perfect match!

The Uganda Partnership (UP) is a small Calgary based organization working on grassroots development projects in Uganda. UP projects are all about enabling people to improve their lives through community involvement, starting right from the project planning stages through to execution.  This encouragement of local leadership and individual participation has lead to sustainable projects with meaningful impact. In the past few years UP has successfully established a number of services including funding for child sponsorship, school leadership programs, community based AIDS awareness and treatment programs and housing and income improvement and sustainability for a number of widows groups through micro finance.

Africa on Canvas, through UP, will be supporting the health and wellness of women in rural communities by funding micro finance loans to a number of emerging widows groups, including groups of women living with HIV/AIDS. Over the past few years, many now established women groups have used the micro finance model to start income generating activities, build new homes for displaced members of the community and more recently have come together and purchased several acres of land. The land will provide the opportunity for community based farming that will minimize the impact of drought and famine in the years to come, other plans for the land include a building that will be used for collective and community based income generation projects, as well as providing a safe home for many local orphans.

To learn more about UP and to read some of their inspiring success stories head on over to the website.