The problem: Lack of food
Compassion Beyond Border's Project Director in East Africa recalls that as a girl she was “hungry when she went to bed at night, hungry when she went to school the next morning”. The situation for girls orphaned by AIDS in Africa today is no different.
When the principal of a school was asked if the girls receiving scholarships went home at lunch time, he replied, “Why would they do that? There's no food there”. Instead, those students who can bring a vegetable from home to school and, if there is enough, a pot of soup is made. If not, students have no lunch that day.
The solution: Goats and more
Goats for Girls is CBB's program to provide food for girls receiving its scholarships. Goats are easy to care for, as they eat almost anything, and they provide nutritious milk, both for the girls and their mothers with AIDS.
Male kids can be sold for money to buy food, while female kids will grow up to give more milk. Each woman receiving a dairy goat gives the first female offspring back to CBB to give to another woman, so that the number of girls being benefited is doubled.
Goats for Girls is more than goats. Each of the guardians caring for a girl receiving a CBB scholarship gets three chickens to provide eggs for them to eat. After chicks are born, they will have an ample supply of eggs.
And still more
Compassion Beyond Borders also rents land and buys seeds and fertilizer for the girls' caretakers to grow food for them in communal gardens. Goats for Girls is not a hand-out. The women, ill with AIDS or frail as grandmothers, still do the hard work of planting, weeding and harvesting the crops on the land rented for them, as well as caring for their goats and chickens.
Goats for girls has been so successful in the project area where it began that CBB is now expanding it to four new locations in Kenya and Uganda.
