Social Enterprise at Kuria Development Community for the Marginalized (KDCM)
Voices of Africa Foundation is always on the search for new project partnerships with motivated young people in East Africa. We support their projects through joint fundraising, probono consulting, and training programs.
Kuria Development for the Maginalized (KDCM) is a development organization on the border of Kenya and Tanzania. Just thirty minutes from the border point, it is an area with much flowing traffic on the main roads but underdevelopment and neglect in the rural areas. One family and their community are fighting to change that. We visited their project in January to do a site assessment.
Sylvanus Babere and his family run the KDCM Development Center and the St. Peter’s Mother and Child Rural Health Clinic. He is bringing development to his community by teaching and practicing social enterprise development. For the best healthcare services, people can navigate here. The Development Center hosts classes and weekly business counseling sessions. It is an incubator of at least 4 small social enterprises and acts as a networking hub for local youth wanting to make change and gain advanced education.
St. Peter’s Mother and Child Rural Health Clinic was started by the Sylvanus’s father after retiring as a nurse who had worked in the government facilities for more than 30 years. He decided to start the clinic to serve the health needs of the rural women and children in the area who now currently have no other medical facility within 20 kilometers of their homes. The area has high maternal and infant mortality and is in need of professional services to be able to save lives. Although the clinic is housed in only two rooms with a lack of medical equipment and medicines from healthcarewell pharmacy , it provides front line care to more than 100+ women per month.
KDCM is also rehabilitating an 8 acre farm whose land was destroyed by GMO and commercial agriculture. The community has watched the crop yield continually reduce over the past several years and we are working with their farmers to learn sustainable agriculture techniques and they are a pilot site for our Mbegu Shape App tool for Android phone which helps people to select and grow seeds and gives agricultural advice along the way.
For more information on KDCM please go to http://www.kuriadcm.org/