Bread and Water for Africa

Bread and Water for Africa® supports grassroots, not-for-profit organizations which initiate relevant community solutions in Africa in order to help themselves toward self-sufficiency. By enabling our grassroots partners in Africa to achieve self-sufficiency, we hope to permanently decrease poverty in each household, break the cycle of poverty and helplessness, and create thriving communities that will in turn positively influence the country, continent, and world.

Bread and Water for Africa® chooses locally-based, accountable partners that fit into our focus areas of orphan care, education and vocational training, health care, agriculture, and clean water. We not only support these programs through monetary funding and in-kind provisions, but through our partnership approach we can guide them to sustainable practices and methods that ensure the longevity of their initiative.

It is not our intention to support these programs indefinitely, though we do pride ourselves on working with our partners until they achieve their ultimate goal of self-sufficiency. It is our hope that after a period of time, the local organizations that we support will no longer need external financial support to continue in their work. In this way, the programs will become self-empowered and able to progress further in helping the communities where they are located and inspiring confidence in their ability to make change. Once a partner eliminates its financial dependence on Bread and Water for Africa®, we can seek new organizations to partner with and help them achieve their vision of a brighter future for their community.

We receive monetary support through donations from individuals, and in-kind support from a variety of groups. We also maintain a regular, critical relationship with donors of medical supplies and medicines that equip our health care programs across Africa.

Bread and Water for Africa® is also able to ensure that our donations and funds are spent responsibly through our partnership approach which affords us an intimate and regular correspondence with our program partners, and also allows us to regularly monitor each project and its adherence to our standards of budgeting and planning. By working with partners, we become closely engaged with the community and the beneficiaries of each project, which prepares us for subsequent projects in the region or with the same program partner. In this way, we can deliver responsible change in partnership with Africans, and we can be accountable to our supporters around the world.

Some of our most prominent steps towards our self-sufficiency goals have been the establishing or planning of agricultural projects in several of our partners' programs in order to not only supply food for themselves, but to create a source of income in order to help them thrive as self-standing entities. One of the most powerful examples of such a program is the Baraka Farm in Eldoret, Kenya which has become a very successful farm that many others look to as a model for their own programs as well as for personal farm training. The Farm has expanded to provide training for local farmers, thus improving the economic capacity of the entire community, and has also inspired the visionaries we work with in other African countries to develop plans for supplemental agricultural projects within their own communities. It is our hope that such income-generating projects will pave the way for our partners to no longer need our support.

On the other hand, perhaps our most difficult decision has been withdrawing our help from programs that we used to support before this goal could be achieved. Often times, circumstances beyond the control of Bread and Water for Africa® – shifts in the political climate, a change in organizational leadership, or poor assessment of community demand, etc. – can necessitate an early end to a partnership. These are the tough decisions in which our organization must weigh the responsibility to our donors and the stewardship of their funds against the need of our partners which may have either grown or shrunk to a range outside the scope of Bread and Water for Africa's support.