Grant awarded to CENCUDER

The Foundation is pleased to support CENCUDER vocational Training Center.

CENCUDER’s vocational training center in Upper Buduma village, is a career, financial empowerment and technology training project for economically disadvantaged women and girls. It targets school drop outs through computer literacy, sewing, and tailoring. The center aims to help them break poverty cycles, generate self-employment, become self-reliant and contribute to a sustainable economy. It is intended to provide hopes to those in despair, create job and employment opportunities to the poor through education and vocational training. Issues the center will address include: unemployment, abject poverty, hunger, sexual and reproductive rights, extreme marginalization and strife. This project has as main objective of reducing extreme suffering as a result of lack of opportunities and support for marginalized women, single mothers, school dropouts and teenage girls in Buduma through practical vocational trainings. Buduma village is a typical slum community in the South West of Cameroon, with above 90% of the households living below the UN poverty line. There are a very limited number of farm employment opportunities. There is also extreme marginalization of women and girls since many, by native laws and customs, don’t have access to land. CENCUDER’s vocational training center is going to help these groups by providing hope, a brighter future, and an opportunity to earn a livelihood. The center will operate two units with two shifts of intensive and practical training every working day. One unit will train women in practical sewing techniques and dress design to serve the general public. The other unit will train them in computer literacy and teach them how to use the internet. This will equip the beneficiaries with the social and vocational skills they need to succeed in life. The center will also provide the women information on menstrual hygiene, as well as their sexual and reproductive rights. CENCUDER intends to set up an interest free loan program that will facilitate the beneficiaries to set up their sewing/tailoring workshops as well as a cyber café upon completion of studies. Through this initiative, many women will be empowered with financials means to enable them to send their children to school, support themselves, and transfer the skills to their children, friends and relatives within their communities.