Two pieces of good news provided the highlight of this week’s UK-Nigeria meeting. The first was that the peer educators project was starting that very day. The second was that officials from the French Embassy - who were visiting Fantsuam Foundation (FF) at the time of last week’s meeting - had agreed to resume funding for the Attachab project.
John Dada told us that in principle the project has been approved and Fantsuam are now mobilising workers to the site.
He further informed us that the French Embassy had reduced the previously-discussed budget by 20% (this was all put on hold due to the post-election violence) but that they are willing to consider further future funding if the first phase goes well.
The project will consist of two phases: Setting up vegetable/crop/ fishery and road infrastructure and training the farmers.
John said: “We expect the first set of funding by next week. I have started to mobilise masons, carpenters, casual labour, a borehole engineer, and a solar engineer for the site. We will hit the ground running.”
Reassuringly, John told us the Embassy had approached FF’s funder Partners for Development for advice and reference. Apparently they were satisfied with their findings.
Wednesday also saw the start of the HIV peer educators’ program funded by UNICEF.
FF have trained 126 youths and selected 100 to continue the training. Each of the 100 will train another 20 over the next 6 months - so by March 2012, FF expect to have trained 1,300 peer educators.
The photo above shows the recently built Health HIV/Aids centre decorated for its opening ceremony.