PRojects directory

Umtha Welanga

Strategic Focus: Emotional & Social Support
Where: South Africa

Umtha Welanga is a small community organisation which offers a loving future to orphans in the sprawling township of Khayelitsha, Cape Town. Since they opened in 2000, they have enabled hundreds of children (both those infected and affected by AIDS) to move successfully into long term foster or extended family care. For many HIV+ or disabled children, institutional care has been seen as the only option for them. It is assumed that private individuals will not take on the emotional and medical responsibility of looking after these kids. However, Umtha Welanga has shown otherwise by pioneering an effective identification, training and support system for over 100 local foster and extended families living in Khayelitsha.

For more information on this project, please download this one-pager.

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We see hope in Dora.

Dora is 20 and runs her own small tailoring business. People bring her orders and fabric which she makes up into clothes using the sewing machine she received when she graduated from the six month HOPEHIV-funded tailoring course run by the Salvation Army. She says that the entrepreneurship training she received has helped her to plan her sales and think about pricing.

Dora is an orphan and dropped out of secondary school due to lack of fees. She ran away from her village to escape the rebels during the war in Uganda and lived in the internally displaced people’s camp in Lira with a relative for many years. Now she has resettled back in the village as the conflict has come to an end. Her dream is earn enough money to go back and complete school one day.

Find out more about HOPEHIV-funded Salvation Army projects in Uganda.

Names have been changed to protect confidentiality.