Livelyhood Support
Income-generating program:
Friends of Orphans (FRO) is running an animal and crop husbandry initiative. We donate animals (pig, goat, cattle) and assorted seeds to former abductees, child mothers, women heading vulnerable families, orphans and people living with disability.
We train the beneficiaries in animal and crop husbandry; offer guidance and expertise; and encourage them to donate a female of the litter to another vulnerable household. Having been away from home for all these years and surviving on relief, leading a normal life again after resettlement becomes a problem. Therefore, food security intervention is essential in rehabilitating the people’s attitude towards life, work and sustainability, as well as supporting them to produce more than enough for both consumption and sale.
Having been in war for the past two decades and living in appalling conditions in the IDP camps for over 21 years, people in Pader and Northern Uganda in general have grown up and known poverty for all or most of their life years. These people have known nothing of affording all the basic of life. This has left a majority in a sense of hopelessness and despair, failure to afford the basic necessities of life like a decent education, health and medical care, housing, feeding; sometimes bordering disaster and famine where international humanitarian organizations had to intervene through food items emergency relief.
Opio Patrick one of the former abductee supported by FRO running a poultry business in Pader town
A recent report by World Food Program, Feb 2007 indicated that 70% of the IDPs that have returned home in Pader district, are facing a food shortage as a result of lack of seeds and farm tools for Agriculture. Likewise, the few who have done farming opened very little land using hands and hoes, that have not allowed them to plant enough to last the season, said the District Agricultural Officer, Pader District, as quoted by the Red Paper News paper, 24/Mar/2007, page 8. It was also reported in the same report that WFP had reduced its food distribution by 60%. WFP feeds about 348,760 IDPs in Pader alone, and this is bound to cause a crisis of food shortage and famine if no effort is made to equip the IDPs and returnees in Pader to be able to produce their own food.