Nigeria is southern Africa’s largest nation. Its people are renowned continent-wide for their energy. Regularly named among the world’s three most corrupt nations and officially one of the world’s top-five petroleum producers, Nigeria bears a mix of lavishly wealthy businessmen alongside millions of poor citizens living stuck in urban slums and undeveloped rural regions. With its split Muslim-Christian population and the history of conflict between the two, the country vibrates with a high energy volatility that is uniquely Nigerian. Though its overall adult HIV-prevalence rate is below 10%, Nigeria holds the world’s third largest population of HIV-positive people.
In 2006 Hands at Work in Africa began a partnership with two Nigerian community organizations caring for the vulnerable and the dying in their communities: Hope 4 Aids Outreach in Lagos, and the Kano Mercy Initiative in the Sahara desert region Kano.
Hope 4 Aids Outreach
Lagos, Nigeria
With 15 local volunteers Hope 4 Aids Outreach is doing home-based care in the incredibly poor Lagos fishing community of Ilaje, as well as providing health advice, STI testing and child-care support to commercial sex workers in Mushin. Hope 4 Aids has also engaged more than 200 pastors from churches across Lagos with a 3-month series of practical workshops on the church’s responsibility to the poor and vulnerable.
Expansion Plans
In Lagos, growth requires further training for project leaders and volunteers on home-based care and orphan care activities, as well as in-depth assessments of the most vulnerable families in the incredibly layered and complex slums of the projects’ operations.
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Kano Mercy Initiative
Kano, Nigeria
In Kano, a predominantly Muslim state, women are highly vulnerable and marginalized. Kano Mercy Initiative is empowering local female farmers and their daughters with literacy classes and agricultural skills training: 30 women travel up to 100 km on foot to attend 3-month workshops conducted by a group of local teachers in a small desert village. Nearby, in a community overrun by the sex trade, a group of 40 commercial sex workers are receive health counseling and HIV testing.
Expansion Plans
In Kano, as the relationship with commercial sex workers grows, the women have begun to express desperation and urgency to quit their work. Several committed women are being groomed now as a test group to receive life-skills training and small scale investment to empower their transition. Also, as word of the literacy and agriculture training spreads, plans to add on to the already cramped classroom and hostel space are developing. Expansion plans include holistic development of the literacy space into a sustainable model with safe accommodation, income-generating agriculture activities, health care, as well as teaching and training.
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