Social impact: Business start-ups

Their businesses are small and varied... e.g.:
• operating small shops; selling charcoal, paraffin, rice, groundnuts, new and second-hand clothes, fish, beans, cassava flour or water, vegetable stalls;
• running restaurants, selling cooked maize, matooke, chips, porridge or coffee; 
• various othger buiness types...tailoring, making jewellery, hair salons transport, making bricks, agriculture, keeping animals, carpentry.

September 2019 statistics show that 284 small businesses have been started over the past 11 years. Only 65 are not currently in business, due to the parent's death, old age, chronic serious illness, relocation to the village, urgent alternative need for the business capital – but only 5 from actual business failure!

So, our IGA programme is a very effective programme for helping slum families raise their standard of living, especially when research carried out by Uganda's leading university found that 50% of Ugandan businesses fail in the first three years.

Most manage to move to a better form of home, eat at least two meals a day and now have access to clean water and a working pit latrine. Many say they now have two pairs of shoes, sleep on a mattress rather than on the ground and can afford to pay school fees for another child to go to a state school.

On our video page you will find some short films made in the Namatala slum of some of the mums who have benefited from the scheme, and how that has influenced the lives of their children. Click here...

• Would you like to help sponsor one of our family support workers that make this happen? Monthly sponsorship starts at just £7 per month, but you can donate more if you wish! Click here for more information...

• Or you could make a single donation...