A Preview of John and Judy's Trip to Africa

In less than a week, John and Judy will be in Africa, seeing the progress of Eliminate Poverty Now's projects in person! They have a packed schedule, and we thought it would be nice to give you an idea of what they'll be doing while they are there.

In their first week, they will be in Nairobi, where they visit the new site for the Little Rock Early Childhood Development Center!

As I mentioned in my first post a few weeks ago, the new buildings will serve 1,000 nursery school children, four times the number of children being served at the current location. We are so excited that this wonderful program is growing.


 John and Judy will meet with Lilly Oyare, founder and director of the Little Rock ECD to discuss the RockPads project, and possible partnerships between U.S. and Kenya Rotary clubs. They will also meet with groups of girls from the Kibera slum who will be receiving sanitary pads through the RockPads project at GlobalGiving.

Early the following week, they will be in Benin to visit the Songhai Center, and to officially launch the Songhai Women's Capital Fund! We are really excited about this project. EPN will be providing start-up capital to the most promising women who graduate from the school to create dozens of successful agricultural entrepreneurs.

Then it's off to Niger, where there will be days of in-depth meetings regarding Farmers of the Future, the Galbal Sewing and Literacy Center, and the Women's Elevage program (referred to in the previous blog entry as "embouche"), among other topics. Judy and John will also be co-hosting the official opening of the Farmers of the Future program! There is hope that the National Minister of Education and representatives from the U.S. Embassy and USAID, as well as other officials, will be in attendance. It promises to be a super exciting event celebrating a truly wonderful program.

And this doesn't cover everything they'll be doing! They will be busy-busy, with lots of wonderful, exciting things, and as promised, they'll be blogging regularly to keep everyone up to speed with news and updated photos. If you're not already subscribing, now's a great time to start, so you don't miss anything! And don't forget to follow us on Facebook and Twitter. We'll always let you know when another post is up.