Our Projects
Agriculture & Environment
Sustainability and ecological practices are central to our work. Rural communities such as Okana depend on agriculture for most of their livelihoods. They also depend on their environment for wood fuel used in the homes. Agriculture and environment go hand in hand. We work with rural community groups including youths and school children to enhance agricultural production and conservation of the environment for future generations. Our interventions include:
- SRI Tree nursery
- Bamboo project
- Kitchen garden project
- School gardens
- Skills and knowledge sharing
- Value chains and entrepreneurship trainings
Community Health
Okana Community faces several health challenges. Being a rural community, health awareness is low and health facilities are far away and deficient. SRI focuses on awareness creation on health and preventive interventions. The health programs are on:
- Awareness creation, advocacy and public health campaigns (link)
- Nutrition and lifestyle diseases (link)
- Maternal health (link)
- Physical education and sports
- Adolescents health
- Community dialogues and health resources
Educational Support, Entrepreneurship and Skills Development
SRI acknowledges education as the most important tool for transforming societies. Within the rural setting in our operations, there are many families facing challenges to education such as lack of school fees or inaccessibility to affordable, quality education. Coupled with that is a high turnover of youthful school leavers and dropouts with no tangible life skills to sustain them in order that they can be productive members of society. This has often led to challenges in young people resorting to crime or alcohol and substance abuse, making them become a burden to society.
Education support
We support our eight partner schools through;
- Strengthen teaching and learnings, school leadership and management .
- Equipment and facilities.
- Scholarships and bursaries for needy students.
- Community dialogues and other school projects .
- Integrating ICTs in Education
- Learning through Play
- Community library
Skills Development
Most rural youths and women lack employable skills. In rural areas, only 5% of youths proceed to higher levels of learning. There is thus high dropout rates from formal learning. While we encourage and support formal education and training, we have to also equip youths and women, who opt not to continue with academic learning with technical and vocational skills to enhance their employability. We have established workshops for skills training and adopted accredited Competency Based Curricula (CBC) approved by the Technical, Vocational Education, and Training Authority (TVET). SRI offers training on:
- Carpentry and joinery
- Tailoring and dress making
- Organic agriculture
- ICT trainings
- Skills acceleration projects
These trainings are offered through the SRI Vocational Training Centre (link) which was registered in 2020.
Youth In Action
The youth are the future of our societies. Developing sustainable societies requires investing in young people and children. In addition to the other interventions in the other programs, SRI has developed specific interventions to develop and nuture the youth and children as a key pillar for the future of the community. These include:
- Leadership and talent development
- Sports and recreation
- Youth leadership development
- Youth dialogues
- Trainings and capacity building
- Youth exchanges and exposure programs