Dear donors, supporters and friends,
Welcome to your last newsletter of 2016.We’re thankful to have closed the year with solid progress on important projects and we are ready to start the new year with a range of plans and targets.
In the category of family infrastructure under which we help farmers and daily wagers build shelter and toilets and gain access to solar electricity, kitchen gas and clean drinking water, we achieved major goals this quarter. Our housing assistance project has since 2008 been helping families living without shelter to build homes and assisting those living in dilapidated rooms near collapse to repair and reconstruct. We provide bricks and/or roofing material and motivate the families to contribute other material and put in the labour themselves. This both preserves their sense of dignity through self-help and ensures a sense of ownership and participation in their own development. This quarter we helped a record 10 families build or repair their homes, taking our total to 51 in the last nine years. We are happy to report that villagers now come to us with a plan of how they will contribute and what assistance they seek; when we started this project, the concept of participation was so alien that they would refuse even to put in the labour themselves. This change is a true marker of empowerment.
