Daniel – entrepreneur for the free market!

Meet Daniel, an entrepreneurial 19-year-old from Uganda. Daniel is no stranger to hardship and poverty, having spent much of his childhood and youth fending for himself and earning a pittance making mud-bricks. This is hard back-breaking work which few but the desperate are willing to do. In many countries, brick-making is considered slave labour, but tragically Daniel was desperate.

Thankfully Daniel’s plight came to an end when he was invited to join a course learning carpentry. He quickly put all his energy into learning how to be the best carpenter he could be.

When he completed his course, he was given his very own TWAM carpentry kit and proudly returned home with more tools than he could ever have dreamed of. He was able to quickly earn a good reputation making simple furniture for his community. This helped Daniel get a reasonable income, but he was not the sort to become complacent and when he heard of a new market opening up in the town he approached the authorities to see if they would give him the contract to make all the market stalls. He spoke with such confidence, he got the order!

The extra money he earned has enabled him to open a workshop and employ a friend from the course who had not done so well for himself. They now make chairs, sideboards and beds. You would think he would be happy with this, but not Daniel! Our budding entrepreneur then decided to approach local schools and government offices to see if he could win contracts from them. Once again his confidence, skill and business training has paid off.

Daniel remains determined to help other young people complete their carpentry training and two more boys have just joined him. He hopes to take on two more later in the year. It’s fantastic to see this enterprising young man transforming his life and importantly using that transformation to change the lives of so many more.

But training is rarely about just teaching a skill and while on his course he was able to deal with many of the deep hurts and emotions surrounding his father abandoning him for another family when his mother died. He felt strong enough to approach his father and talk about his actions and bring about a measure of reconciliation.

So what of the future for Daniel? He tells us he is determined to be as wise as his namesake Daniel in the Bible and is already a youth leader in his church. Secondly he says with a smile:

‘My dream is to have the biggest workshop in Lira, producing quality furniture and training young people.’

Daniel is another amazing example of what can be done with a hurting, desperate young life when someone offers them a chance to change. Thank you for helping make this possible through the gift of a carpentry tool kit.

“We said to each other – why should our community be the poorest?”

The central factor in everything TWAM does is the formation of community groups who recognise a need in their community and are then determined to meet it. Many would share the motivation of the Neath Women’s Project (NWP) who have done just that and placed TWAM at the heart of their work.

The NWP is made up of 12 widows living in the capital Lusaka. Their income is meagre by most people’s standards but far surpasses that of their home community. They all moved to Lusaka from the rural area of Neath, which is one of the poorest in Zambia. In Neath, most people rely on growing their own food, which is a perilous existence, at the best of times, with unreliable rains and nutrient poor soils. Thus, harvests fail and people starve. When the ladies visited Neath they could not help but be impacted by what they saw and slowly started to form a plan. The group leader, Nawina (black and white striped top) tells us:

“We live in Lusaka with electricity and water, and we said to each other – why should our home community be the poorest? We must help.”

They realised the people most in need of help were widows and vulnerable women like themselves. So they applied to TWAM for 20 sewing and knitting machines and then returned to Neath to start their project. Nawina continues:

“We went home and identified some of the poorest women and offered to train them in tailoring. But there was a condition, all the women had to agree to help set up and join a community club. Then each club was given some sewing machines to share.”

The reason the women had to join a community group was because the widows of Lusaka understand the crippling effect of loneliness felt by many widows. They recognised that poverty took many forms including emotional and spiritual harm. By bringing the women together they instilled friendship, support and a shared determination to change their lives.

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We will be adding additional inspirational stories here when TWAM makes them available to us.