Ekisa Ministries International

The goal of Ekisa Ministries is two-fold: first, we aim to provide the best care for the children in our residential program and to find families for each child that will love and care for them; secondly, we aim to promote and provide support in the prevention of children, specifically children with disabilities, being placed in orphanages.

The main objective of the Community Care Outreach Program and the School Program are to empower and support families with a child with special needs so that they do not reach a point of desperation and chose to abandon their child.

The other component of prevention is education. The families in our CCO Program receive training and teaching about the care of their child, and also about the cause and physiology of disability. The purpose of this is to reverse the deep seeded belief that disabilities are the cause of curses or other superstitions and to eliminate the shame that goes along with those beliefs.

Finally, whenever possible, we choose to fill positions within our organization with individuals living with disabilities in our community who might not otherwise be able to find suitable work.

We are working hard in all these things in order that we might begin to change the perception of the community at large and reduce the stigma towards disability in general. It is our desire to impact the community in such a way that people begin to see that individuals with disabilities have just as much value as those that do not.

In addition to support, counseling and physiotherapy being available at the home for our community care families, we have recently started operating Community Outreach and Rehabilitative Empowerment (CORE) groups in districts outside of the area we operate in. As transport can be expensive and travelling with a child with disabilities can be challenging, we wanted to provide the same services to those families that are unable to come to us. One of our physiotherapists and one of our social workers attend these groups, which are currently operating once a week at two different locations.

One program that is currently in the planning phase is the Respite Care Program. The Respite Care Program would help to further reduce the strain on our community care families by having scheduled times where their child spends one to two days at Ekisa, providing respite for the care takers.

Other strategies were outlined in the "Goals" section.

Ekisa employees a staff of 12 social workers, and 7 therapists which work towards accomplishing our organizational goals within each of our programs. A large percentage of our annual budget is spent on our Community Care Program and the work of our social workers.

Our residential program resides in a building that has been modified to meet the needs of the children in our care. A large staff of care takers and nurses provides exceptional care to all of the children residing at Ekisa.

- 140 total in our Community Care outreach program across two service locations (Jinja and Iganga)
- 9 Resettlements
- 2 Domestic Adoptions
- 4 Foster Care Placements
- 6 International Adoptions
- Ekisa Academy, our dedicated special education school, opened February 2015 with a half-day school program and expanded to a full-day program in February 2019
- the Training and Equipping Department was opened in 2020 to help organizations effectively support children with disability as well as assist Ugandan children’s homes and orphanages with the tools, know-how and support to safely reunify children and transition to family care with the goal of reaching and placing more children in families by walking alongside organizations and providing them with transition and disability support services
- opened a second Community Care outreach centre in a neighbouring town in March 2021 with 55 families enrolled