Sponsor

A Child

We initiated Children Sponsoring Program (CSP), in partnership under the patronage of Middle Smithfield Presbyterian Church (East Stroudsburg, PA).

Sponsors are linked with children through our children sponsorship program. Our vision is ‘to look after orphans and widows in their distress’ – James 1:27

Just $20 a month (63 ¢ a day!) Your sponsorship will help make possible programs that respond to your sponsored child’s (and other children’s) most basic needs (food, tuition, school uniform, basic health care, etc.)

Microfinance

For Africa

Muhammad Yunus, founder of Grameen bank, puts it best: Poverty is not created by the poor. It is created by the structures of society and the policies pursued by society. Change the structure as we are doing in Bangladesh, and you will see that the poor change their own lives.

Grameen’s experience demonstrates that, given the support of financial capital, however small, the poor are fully capable of improving their lives.

Low-income entrepreneurs in sub-Saharan Africa have very limited access to capital, deposit and other financial services provided by banks and financial institutions. Willing and capable entrepreneurs are unable to access the capital necessary to create or grow sustainable their business and generate incomes to support themselves and their families.

Blessings On Africa’s

Strategy

Blessings on Africa’s strategy is to use microfinance as one of its tools to alleviate poverty in Africa. In partnership with Microfund and Kiva, Blessings On Africa helped 15,408 Micro Entrepreneurs (10835 Women and 4,583 Men) with small, life changing loans in Sub-Saharan Africa. Our goal is to reach 500,000 Micro Entrepreneurs in the next three years. The micro loans we make and support we provide help the entrepreneurs generate income to support their family, send the children to school and invest in the community. Truly, these loans are helping “fight poverty one family at a time”.

Supporting

Micrifinance Institutions

In Sub-Saharan Africa, there are commercially viable and well managed Microfinance Institutions (MFIs) in need of capital to expand and respond to the growing need of microcredit. In North America and Europe, there are private capitals in search of socially responsible investments. BOA role is to provide the opportunities to the institutional investors to invest directly in well managed MFIs of their choice. Because BOA has expertise in the West African Finance market, we will provide to these investors every step of the way.

Food Security

A stable local agricultural base is key to a community responsive food system. “Community food security is a condition in which all community residents obtain a safe, culturally acceptable, nutritionally adequate diet through a sustainable food system that maximizes community self-reliance and social justice.” (Michael W. Hamm and Anne C. Bellows, Rutgers University, New Jersey)

Community food security represents a comprehensive strategy to address many of the ills affecting our society and environment due to an unsustainable and unjust food system.

Blessings on Africa is committed to addressing a broad range of problems affecting the food system, community development, and the environment in West Africa such as increasing poverty and hunger, disappearing ecosystems, farmland, rural community disintegration, and air and water pollution from unsustainable food production and distribution patterns.

Disaster Prevention And Relief

Our emergency relief programs provide desperately needed assistance to victims of natural disaster, war, disease, and famine in West Africa.

Environmental Protection

Tree planting can help the African continent cope with climate change and also provide a long-term solution to the continent’s food scarcity problems. Blessings on Africa aims to lead a tree planting campaign of 1 Million trees over the next 5 years to help prevent a ” climate disaster” on the continent.

Alternative And Renewable Energy

Fewer than 25 percent of Africans have access to electricity. Most rural poor in Africa use kerosene lamps, which are heavy Co2 polluters and are bad for their health. A solar lamp would be cheaper and better for the environment.

In addition, the lack of access to affordable electricity is a major cause of poverty in rural Africa. Blessings on Africa seeks to provide solar solutions to rural Africa’s energy problem by:

• Providing rural Africa with solar lamps, which are cheaper and healthier than kerosene lamps.
• Helping build solar cookers. Solar cookers are much safer and can be easily built from cardboard and waste reflective material.
• Providing solar energy to rural communities, schools, clinics, and churches.