Help Heal
MDGs-Poverty, Maternal Health, Women
About Us
Our main goal is to respond to the challenges of poverty and ill health in the Nyanza province of Western Kenya in a sustainable way through which our beneficiaries can support themselves on a long-term basis.
We provide a number of services to our surrounding community including:
- li>A Maternal and Child Health Supplementary Feeding Program which targets pregnant and lactating mothers (in partnership with the World Food Programme)
- Provision of farm inputs to agricultural dealers to increase access to local farmers
- Output marketing of the bulk produce from the agricultural dealers
- Capacity building for farmers and local communities on how to access the full range of necessary inputs, better farming practices, and post-harvest grain handling
- Facilitating access to cheaper or better inputs, strengthening the delivery of business and financial services, enabling the flow of information, facilitating improved market access and increasing access to higher-value markets for crops produced by the local smallholder farmers
- Connecting women beneficiaries to microfinance institutions for micro-enterprise development
Our Community
We work in Kisumu East and West Districts, Siaya, Homabay, and Nyando districts in Nyanza province of the Republic of Kenya. A total of 4670 beneficiaries have been covered under our maternal child health programme to date. On the other hand we have targeted 386 small-holder farmers on production of high value crops through provision of farm inputs and collective marketing of their produce.
Currently we work on a maternal and child health program targeting pregnant and lactating mothers. The broad objective of the program is to improve, as a preventive and protective measure, the nutritional status of the clients of the OBA voucher program who are malnourished or are vulnerable to malnutrition. We also seek support to involve the mothers exiting the program to engage in viable income generating activities to ensure household food security and to help them meet the needs of their children in a province with the largest number of orphaned and vulnerable children and that is carrying the heaviest burden of HIV/AIDS in Kenya.
History
Help Heal was registered in June 2005 through the Ministry of Culture and Social Services in Kisumu. In July 2006 through the support of Techno Serve Kenya, International Crops Research Institute, and The Catholic Relief Services, we initiated a beneficiary owned venture (Kenya Smallholder Farmers Investment Company Limited) to provide a market for the high value crops propagated by Help Heal. This helped beneficiaries identify primary revenue generating drivers based on their land utilization and focus on crops that have potential to open up opportunities for income generation. We hope to further expand our services through the use of volunteers.