‘I am very lucky as I get to go to school. I like school, school is beautiful. I like studying letters and numbers and I hope I can keep going to school because so many children can’t afford to. Sometimes after school and at the weekends I help my mother by sweeping the floor, and help to look after the pigs and my grandmothers chickens’.

Seven year old Keles is pictured here with the pigs that his mother raises through the CEPAD programme.

At school Keles is part of a feeding programme where the students get milk and CWS’s partner CEPAD helps his family and many others with their farms and in raising animals.
CWS partner, CEPAD (Council of Evangelical Churches) has developed its “patio” or farm-yard programme, mainly for women, who are responsible for providing food in the family. The women are trained in animal rearing and then supplied with chicks, piglets, lambs, calves or cows in calf. The animals are a source of both food and income and the women pay back the loan by passing on some of the first offspring, so that others can benefit from the programme.