Extreme Poverty

Karen McKenna on February 9th, 2012

The BeadforLife team was finishing up home visits to the members in Iganga when we met Eseza, a malnourished four year old girl with severe burns along the right side of her face. Her right eye was entirely burned shut.  Eseza  had fallen into a pot of hot beans at a neighbor’s house three days earlier. [...]

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BeadforLife Staff on November 28th, 2011

BeadforLife is excited to share stories of three amazing women from our newest group of bead makers, Favor.  These women are changing their lives and providing food, schooling and hope for their children.  We are so inspired by them and know you will be to. Meet Rosette: Rosette is a 34 year old widowed mother of 6 children whose ages [...]

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BeadforLife Staff on November 15th, 2011

By BeadforLife Volunteer, Karen McKenna Nayiwemula Edith used to dig in other people’s gardens to make enough money to send one of her five children to school.  She now owns two acres of land in a village in eastern Uganda where she plants maize and rice.  The profit from these crops, along with income from [...]

Continue reading about A Mattress to Lie On

BeadforLife Staff on November 3rd, 2011

According to United Nations the 7 billionth person was born this week. CNN recently posted an article entitled: How women defused population bomb.  In his article, Fred Pearce talks about how “women today are having half as many children as their mothers and grandmothers. The global average is now down to 2.5 children per woman, [...]

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“The world’s worst forgotten humanitarian crisis” according to former U.N. Humanitarian Coordinator Jan Egeland, was northern Uganda.  Mr. Egeland made this remark in 2006 and while northern Uganda “is dramatically different than it was in 2006,” the effects of Joseph Kony’s reign of terror can be felt when you talk to many of the members of BeadforLife’s Shea Project. Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army [...]

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BeadforLife Staff on October 19th, 2011

By Irene Namaganda, Membership Coordinator, BeadforLife As the person responsible for BeadforLife’s membership recruitment process in Uganda I have preconceived ideas of who would be a good fit in our program.  I would not, for example, be looking at women carrying a nice hand bag, wearing a pretty dress or living in a fancy house.  My eye is trained [...]

Continue reading about “You Don’t Curse Your Place of Birth Before You Die”

BeadforLife Staff on October 18th, 2011

Since the beginning of the year, the Uganda currency has been falling against the dollar.  When I moved to Uganda in 2008, you could get about 1600 shillings per dollar. Now the rate is around 2900.  Imagine if two years ago you spent $5.50 for a sandwich and today it cost you $10 – that [...]

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Devin Hibbard on October 11th, 2011

Apple Computer founder Steve Jobs died last week, and although I’m not a Mac user or part of the cult of Apple, I’ve been thinking a lot about the impact he had on the world.  What made Jobs a visionary is not that he created functionality – in fact, there were lots of gadgets that [...]

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BeadforLife Staff on April 28th, 2011

Today’s article by Lester R. Brown in Foreign Policy about the rising prices of food and, its impact on the world’s poorest people, caught our attention and we want to share it with you… In the United States, when world wheat prices rise by 75 percent, as they have over the last year, it means the difference between [...]

Continue reading about The New Geopolitics of Food by Lester R. Brown

BeadforLife Staff on April 25th, 2011

Author, Dr. Paul Polak provides an intersting perspective on poverty’s impact on the environment.  One of BeadforLife’s advisory board members, Dr. Polak, is the founder of Colorado-based non-profit International Development enterprises(IDE).  IDE is dedicated to developing practical solutions that attack poverty at its roots.  Dr. Polak is also the author of the book, Out of Poverty:  http://amzn.to/g7seBB. I believe that [...]

Continue reading about Why Ending Poverty is Greener than Green by Paul Polak