Covid-19 Relief Intervention Project.

Kiiza S. Hussein an international lawyer by profession and Global Goodwill Ambassador, Books for peace award winner 2019, Queen young leader award winner 2017 and the WYSP youth Ambassador who has established a career in human rights defense, youth empowerment & peace and climate change activism. Ultimately I believe in the values of democracy and rule of law. I serves as Africa lead at Our Cause organization and as the founder and Managing Partner at SHK Law Attorney's also Founder of Young Entrepreneurs and Leadership Initiative. Throughout my life I have advocated for girl child rights, youth rights, Women’s rights, climate change action and Youth Empowerment. I Aspire to become a leading figure on international level who leads others in addressing global challenges and make a the World a better place. 

Covid 19 exacerbated the crisis that refugees face and made them more vulnerable and at risk of of catching covid19 and related effects such as hunger due to shortage of food donation. Seeing the how refugee live in Syria, Yemen, Uganda, Rwanda among other countries where refugees are hosted was nightmare to us.  

It is from this background that we planned the project that would intervene to support women and disabled children living in refugee camps to have capacity to make and distribute personal protective equipment (PPE) that would protect refugees from covid19 but also become a source of economic empowerment to women who struggle to earn a living in refugee camps.  Our project goes further to provide medical and food relief to women and disabled children living in refugee camps. We believe this project elevates humanity by empowering people in most risky situations to be part of global solutions.  

An unprecedented 70.8 million people around the world have been forced out of their homes due to conflicts and persecution be end of 2018. with around 30 million people todate being refugees around the world. In Rwanda 150000 are refugees who are hosted as a result of conflicts and violence that has been taking place in DRC and Burundi. with the outbreak of the global pandemic of covid19 these refugee faces double crises that they can't handle without the international support and community support. 

Our project covid19 relief intervention initiative is aiming to support these refugees whom 75% are women and children living in the mahama Camp that is hosting 50000 refugees and hopefully our initiative will be scaled up to other refugee camps from around the world.  We believe by empowering women who are majority in refugee camps to manufacture personal protective equipments (PPE) such as face masks, it will help in preventing the spread of covid19 in refugee camps but also help raise money from selling some of the manufactured items to the host communities. With our projects we also plan to supply refugees with hand sanitizers and food relief that they badly need during this pandemic.

The project is a unique initiative the fact that it seeks to empower women in refugee camps to be at the frontline of fight and preventing the spread of Covid19 in refugee camps by using provided sewing machines to make Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) such as masks that would be distributed in refugee camps in order to prevent the spread of coronavirus. Also the project intervenes to economically empower women who would earn income from sewing the masks from local fabric that would be cheaply sold to the local community and support resilience and prevalence against Covid 19.

The project goes on to extent sanitizers and food relief to women and disabled children living in Refugee camps whose needs cannot  be met during the lock down or in a period when there is shortage of global support to refugees due to Global pandemic that has affected all countries and governments

Our project is directed to serve the people who are more at risk and yet lack resources to fight covid19. we are looking at supporting refugees living in Mahama camp in eastern part of Rwanda, however our project will be scaled to other refugee camps where with think our initiative can empower women and save live of refugee from ravages of covid19 and hunger. 

We are engaging with women refugee who are living in the camp and also whom we have worked together in the past initiatives to see how can we empower women to be part of the solution to global crisis but also economically empowered them so that they are in position to support their children and also care after their healthy and social and economics demands   

We believe the challenge our project will be addressing is related to Elevate Prize since it will elevate humanity and offer hope and solution to the challenges people who are more at risk yet forgotten meet in there liverhood. we agree that refugee are more at risk from all sorts of dangers including infectious diseases, hunger and lack of opportunities for women to be economically empowered. with our project we shall mitigate the challenge of lack of economic empowerment through provision of sewing machines and also mitigate the spread of covid19 through availing hand sanitizer and face-masks produced by women. 

In july 2019 i was working as a consultant with UNICEF on a project that sought to identify and empower children among them those living in refugee camps, i had an opportunity to meet and engage with over 500 refugees coming from 4 refugee camps in Rwanda whom among them were women and children. They shared with me there personal life stories and i was inspired but also challenged to start thinking differently about the life of refugees. 

I started taking keen interest to know more about how they lived and used to send some small money to some refugees who were disabled and lacked opportunities like other refugees had. Then in March 2020, covid19 reached Rwanda and we went into lockdown. many people faced the challenge of food and other basic needs due to forced lockdown. I begun to imagine the kind of life the refugees are living now that there was global shortage of relief support to refugee due to the pandemic that had affected the whole world. The fact that each refugee receive only  5 dollars that was supposed to support them for a whole week was unimaginable to me thus i thought about this project.

The fact that i worked with refugees living in refugee camps exposed me to the reality of how indeed refugees lived and why the world should care about their lives. When a young girl called Ongerusenge irly who frew violence from Burundi told me the life she lived as a disabled girl and how her own father disowned her due to her disability and having to run away from Burundi during a crisis and now living in a refugee camp in eastern part of Rwanda, it was a very sobering moment for me to hear and see her go through such hardship. now with the outbreak of coronavirus, it has made her be more at risk since she has heart disease, therefor her story other stories of refugees that i come to learn about while working with them in refugee camp made me believe that i could do something that can save them during this global pandemic. 

In the past i have worked as a consultant with UNICEF where i coordinated my work with UNHCR while working to empower children and women on their human rights, my work during that period gave me the skills and competence to work on other different projects that i believe have positive impact on refugees,  Additionally i not only work as international lawyer but also lead an international organisation as the "Africa Lead" at our cause organisation where i developed coordinate and implement projects that resonate with fulfillment of global sustainable development goals on the African Continent.

With over 8 years of working in civil society organisation and international development institutions such as UNICEF, EU and The Commonwealth , this has earned me the skills and competences to handle big projects and initiatives that seek to have positive impact on people and environment.    

In October 2015 it was reported that at around 4 am in the morning, a hash rainfall had rained in the parts of southwestern Uganda and Eastern Uganda and killed over 500 people who were buried alive by landslide and destroyed properties as a result of unprecedented and un forecasted rain. my family and relatives were living in southwestern Uganda so you can imagine how scared i was to hear the bad news. fortunately my immediate family was unheart since they lived in a small town but may relatives were greatly affected. i decided that i would do something about. I researched about climate change and started mobilizing youth in which  we educated communities on dangers of climate change and the mitigation and adaptation measure to be implemented However we lacked funding and the small maney i was using from my own pocket had dried off. on the brink of losing our momentum i decided to rethink and approach different institutions and possible partners, fortunately my efforts paid off, the Gemenay Embassy granted us 13000 EUROS to our project and through the project we planted 1,000,000 treets and powered 200 families with solar powered lights, This is how overcome adversity.   

It used to be in my thoughts that leadership was always about taking leadership roles in schools, private institutions and in national politics, so growing up i had always participated in election campaigns for my father during local government political positions and usually he always won those positions uptodate. to myself i would always engage in students leadership since i was a kid in primary level where i served as class monitor and healthy prefect upto secondary level where i served as head prefect. Cleary i was always a leader in all the schools i went to up to university and national level where i campaign to serve as student guild president and later served as the attorney general. However my understanding of leadership changed when i began to take active role in global activism and leading projects that responded to social challenges such as climate change, domestic-violence and youth unemployment. I started appreciating that my true leadership is not only in political contestation but rather in villages and communities where i was transforming people's lives through use of clean renewable energy as mitigation to climate change and helping women who are victims of domestic violence have access to justice. 

Refugees and asylum seekers needed help protecting themselves from the disease, keeping their families fed and housed, and facing all of the other difficulties of life as displaced persons. But how?

According UNHCR and HIAS survey, 70% of displaced people report that they cannot meet their basic needs for food. About 60% of people cannot meet their need for shelter. About 60% of people cannot meet their need for WASH resources, and over 75% of people cannot meet their need for health care.

Alongside these basic challenges, the crisis has caused widespread loss of livelihoods and income, posed threats to legal protection, impacted mental health and resilience, and increased both the risks and incidence of GBV.

We find our project unique and answering to some of the highlighted report challenges since , the women and children who constitutes 75% of the refugee according to United Nations Humanitarian Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) are more vulnerable and at risk than other age groups and gender, therefore our work will not only mitigate the spread of coronavirus which currently has affected over 11 million people worldwide and killed over 500,000 but will also empower women with lifetime skilled of sewing machines and using them both as a source of economic empowerment and social solutions to the pandemic through manufacture of Face Nose mask. 

The Cobweb theory is my theory of change, If you allow me to use my analogy, i believe women are like cobwebs and so there actions are the cobwebs they create that letter connects development to everyone, this may sound vague to some but in literal meaning it means that if you empower women, women will always transfer the positive impacts to children's and everyone in the family and the society and then you will see a wide spread of impact in everything and everyone in the society, that is why i believe that if you want to have real impact spread to everyone just empowered women and women will be the driver of the positive impact which will translate into development. Thus by our project targeting women in refugees camps, we believed that positive impacts will be passed on to other family member living with those women in the refugees camps and finally it will spread to all the refugees in the camp since most of them are women and children who all are interconnected and interdependent . just like the saying goes, if you want to have really impact in the world. epower women. 

Our project is serving 50,000 refugee people in Mahama Camp RWanda. 

In One year we plan our project to be serving 500,000

In five years our project is planned to scale up and serve 5 million refugees in Uganda, Rwanda and Lebanon with possibility of including Syria and Yemen. 

In the next year we plan to have directly impacted over 500,000 refugees in Rwanda and Uganda by equipping them with transferable business and social skills of identifying and solving challenges within their communities but also generate income through entrepreneurship ventures. we also plan to supply necessary tools such as sewing machines and stove making machines to help purposely women and youth become economically empowered.

In Five years we plan that our project should have reached at least 5,000,000 people across Rwanda, Uganda and Lebanon where most refugees are hosted in a avery poor countries that need international support.  

Our biggest challenge are financial and technical support that we need in order to deliver on our project in the next one year and five years, for example we lack funds to procure sewing machines and stove making machines to be distributed to women and some youth in refugee camps,

Whereas we can provide our trainers and mentors to empower women in refugee camps in Rwanda, Uganda and Lebanon, we lack finances to facilitate for the transport and accomodation to the different refugee camps in different locations around the countries during the period of training and capacity building.

With the lack of funds, we are meeting a challenge of failing to buy food and medical supplies to the targeted groups in the refugee camps 

We have a plan to of solving some of our challenges, 

- We are responding to open grant calls in order to stand a chance of being granted funding for the project. 

- In relation to technical challenges like obtaining sewing machines and stove making equipments, we are planning to reach out to companies and factories that make sewing machines and stove making equipment to see  if they can partner with us and donate to the cause. 

- With regards to the food relief and medical supply, we are reaching out to organisations, private businesses and international institutions and medical facilities to seek their support to our project by donation to the project. 

Currently we are working with YELP organisation that has offered its trainers and mentors to help in training and skilling women in refugee camps with business skills and social problem solving skills.

We are also working with Queen's commonwealth Trust a charity organisation based in UK that is willing to promote our work to potential partners and funders around the world.

Our financial sustainability is through fundraising and partnerships with organisations and institutions that may resonate with our mission and vision for our project. However we also plan to use the knowledge and skills girls/women and youth in refugees camps will have got to make and sale fabric cloths, marks and energy saving stoves to the local and international communities where the income would be used for project sustainability. 

Estimated Expenses for 2020.

• Rent-20000
• Utility bills-2050
• Phone bills/communication costs-10000
• Accounting/bookkeeping-30000
• Legal/insurance/licensing fees-30000
• Postage-3000
• Technology-100,000
• Advertising & marketing-50000
• Salaries-80000

Variable Costs

• Cost of Goods Sold-150000
• • Materials and supplies-65000
  • Packaging-4000
• Direct Labor Costs-78000
• • Customer service-1000
  • Direct sales-29000
  • Direct marketing-8000

Total= 660050

The COVID-19 crisis both highlights and increases the barriers faced by displaced communities. In many contexts, both general government services and COVID-19 response services are limited to individuals with a
specific legal status only. “Hidden” structural and social barriers, such as hunger/food shortage and discrimination in access to medical service
distribution or lack of access  to services like Health care all make the life in refugee camp miserable and we believe any support and efforts to ameliorate the challenges women and children who are majority are facing should be sourced and we believe the Elevate prize can be awaiting relief to most refugees who are mostly forgotten in crisis like the one the world is dealing with. 

The Elevate Prive will not only provide food and medical relief and empower women and girls, and youth living in refugee camps but will also restore hope in many refugees who think the world has forgotten them amidst a global pandemic of covid19.

Through our partnership we are looking forward to create a honest and lasting partnership with our partners and sponsors, we are looking for partners who can help us achieve our goals for helping over 5,000,000 refugee people who are mostly forgotten yet living in the most dangerous and favorable situation and those are the refugees and other internally displaced people. We are looking for partners who are committed to making a world a better place for everyone.

United Nation/UNHCR: The United nations and its sister organisations like Unicef and UNHCR can help us in increasing resources and making good policies for refugees around the world and mostly girls/women and youth refugees. 

UNICEF- Unicef can help in addressing children's needs for those with disabilities living in refugee camps. 

World Red Cross- The organisation can help in securing most people who are living in war torn areas and need emergency relief 

Bill & Melinda Foundation.: The foundation can help our project by donating funds and resource like computer for our project and for women literacy 

Gates Foundation- The foundation can help in offering scholarship to outstanding girls and children with disabilities give them scholarship to the best education institutions around the world. 

Unilever: This can help our project by donating to the social needs of the refugees like book, sanitary materials. hand sanitisers ects.  

World bank: The institution can be a potential donor to our project for the long term sustainability but also can help in providing mentors and policy influence at global and country level. 

Nobel Prize Foundation. This can also be an institutions that can support us by recognising advocates who are championing humanitarian and world development .

European Union. This can help in funding for our project in the 5 year goal plan than will help impact over 5,000,000 refugees in Africa and Middle east,