Established formally in 2014 Hope For The Elderly Ministries Uganda was along time vision of its founder, Ms Josephine Apio to take care of the elderly. Established formally in 2014 Hope For The Elderly Ministries Uganda was along time vision of its founder, Ms Josephine Apio. Raised in a poverty and HIV/AIDS infected area, Josephine grew up to witness great impoverishment and affliction in her co
mmunity particularly among the elderly who didn’t have much care. Her great attachment to one of these seniors made her promise herself to do something about their condition as soon as she could. A relentless prompt within her spirit coupled with persistent calls from within the community for such services confirmed that this was a divine mission. It’s a fully fledged and registered organization with registration number 10881 (S. 5914/10950) meeting all the legal requirements of organizational operation in Uganda. HFTEMU’s Headquarters are currently located in Kisoko Sub-county in Tororo District and has field operations and community presence in Omonyole and surrounding villages. HFTEMU leads an integrated approach in delivering quality results amongst its beneficiaries including condition regular fellowships with the seniors for spiritual and emotional support, conducting regular home visits for evaluation and support, provision of hot meals, basic needs, and health care among others. HFTEMU envisions an “empowered and healthy elderly Community living satisfying lives”. Improve the socio-economic and spiritual wellbeing of the elderly and their dependants. HFTEMU’S Strategic Objectives. HFTEMU is established to pursue the following objectives:
a) To support the spiritual wellbeing of the elderly through ex*****on of such programmes as fellowships, home cells and discipleship classes. b) To provide psycho-social and emotional support to the elderly and their families through counseling and guidance services so as to improve on their coping abilities. c) To enhance the elderly people’s households socio-economic welfare through running of economic development initiatives such as income generating activities. d) To support the welfare of the children under the elderly care through education and welfare support as a means of improving the elderly welfare by lessening their care burden. Hope for the Elderly is premised on the following Core Values.
• Christ centeredness.
• Accountability.
• Care.
• Centrality of Human Rights.
• Love for the Elderly. Programme Interventions. HFTEMU currently pursues the following programme Interventions. Spiritual nurture. HFTEMU undertakes fellowships and individual home based prayers with the beneficiary seniors. This is aimed at bringing hope to the lives of the seniors who are in most cases dejected but also prepare them to have a relationship with Jesus Christ since they are in their terminal days. Seniors social welfare support. Many of the seniors under our care are needy without the ability to regularly and consistently avail themselves the most basic of their needs such as soap, sugar, paraffin and food. While we currently don’t reach all our beneficiaries with every basic need, HFTEMU provides some of the seniors with basic supplies such as soap, sugar salt, paraffin and lighting. This makes them feel loved and appreciated giving them more hope in life and a purpose of living. Psycho-social support and care of older persons. The breakdown of community resource systems has led to isolation of older persons and inactive ageing as a result; they suffer from stigma, physical and mental abuse, discrimination and neglect. The interventions include:
i providing counseling and guidance for older persons;
ii. Encouraging experience sharing among older persons;
iii. Encouraging intergenerational activities for older persons groups or associations;
Home visits and Outreaches. We conduct several home visits to the various homes of our seniors. While many are planned, some are spontaneous to evaluate their conditions of stay and needs on a normal day. A lot still has to be done to improve on the seniors’ welfare. Many don’t get the care they wanted from their attendants while some were not attended to at all times. This put their lives at risk. Health care interventions. Our experience revealed that good health care and attention was the seniors’ highest priority need. Their health regularly fluctuates and needs regular attention. We try to get some of the seniors’ health attended to in clinics and hospitals. Our plan however is to run a fully fledged health scheme where the seniors simply check-in at partner hospitals on a customized arrangement. We also have plans to run our own health facility at the seniors’ center. Advocating for seniors rights and needs. HFTEMU is building a strong base and linkages to strongly advocate for the rights and needs of seniors particularly at the local level in Tororo but also foster advocacy efforts at National level. Through its outreaches, public functions and private interactions, the HFTEMU leadership is playing a growing role in making the plight, needs and rights of Seniors known. As a result of these initiatives, many individuals and corporate bodies are expected to come up to support our cause and work. Research and Documentation. HFTEMU has noted that older persons have accumulated vital information on various aspects of community life. Unfortunately most of this vital information is not well captured and documented for posterity. The interventions include:
i. Conducting studies on older persons. Disseminating vital information of older persons of their respective cultural background. HFTEMU currently is supporting 40 seniors in the above areas. This includes 28 women and 12 men in various areas of Tororo. There more women than men seniors and in comparative terms, women were established to be in more deplorable conditions often with no care but instead shouldering the burden of taking care of grandchildren that are abandoned with them. Our support however is still largely limited to spiritual, emotional and basic needs provision at very minimal terms and should be scaled up to create impact. The programmes interventions stand out distinct from other earlier project interventions of other organisations in that they are in pari-material with national policy for the Older persons and the Laws of Uganda. Prospects. We also intend to nurse prospects of constructing two shallow wells as a means of addressing the local water crisis which translates into hardship and poor health for the elderly who hardly have the energy to trek long distances to fetch the water once we get funding for it. We intend to address food security among our target beneficiaries by undertaking quality and modern agricultural production on 5 acres of land that will work as production and demonstration units for modern agricultural production initiatives in drought prone areas. We intend to buy 3 hectares of land and construct office and community centre where the elderly can hold their meetings from other than sitting under a mango tree, whereby when it rains it becomes so challenging. We will focus on ongoing care for the health and general needs of the seniors. We will continue offering the social welfare and health improvements initiatives to the seniors. Hope For The Elderly Ministries Uganda’s operations will be scaled up through its increased partnerships with organizations and individuals locally and internationally pursuing similar programmes such as Reach the Aged for better synergy and advantages that accrue from such partnerships. We intend to recruit fulltime technical staff at the secretariat and increase the number of field volunteers to attend to the needs of the seniors. This will enhance the organizational capacity to deliver better services to the seniors under its care. For nothing is impossible with God Luke 1:37
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ABOUT ; Background, Objective, Funders, Activities, Gallery
Meet Our team
Ofwono John Paul (head legal& Advocacy)
Apio Josephine (team leader)
Kalibbala Joshua (IT manager)
Okoth davis (finance and admin manager)
Othieno Lazarus (Driver)
Hassan Salim (Education and community relations officer)
