The challenge that the project addresses
Refugee women living with disabilities
What is your project doing to respond to this challenge?
Refugee women living with disabilities in Cape Town are trapped in poverty and lack income-generating opportunities, hence, increases the likelihood that they may engage in sex work, begging, and/or exploitative relationships. This project, therefore, brings back the dignity of refugee women with disabilities in Cape Town by providing them with handicraft skills. By skilling them with handcraft skills, the project seeks to remove refugee women with disabilities from begging at traffic lights, trains, and in the central business district of Cape Town. At the moment, the project is made up of 7 refugee mothers with disabilities from different countries. These refugee women with disabilities make baskets, mats, and other handmade artifacts. Of these 7 project members, 3 of them have certificates in art and craft from their home countries and are responsible for training other project women. To this end, the project has managed to remove at least 15 refugee women living with disabilities from begging at traffic lights, in trains, and in the CBD of Cape Town. This project is sustainable because training is provided by project members to other members.
This project in the media:
https://www.pressreader.com/south-africa/cape-times/20180619/281861529222021
https://www.groundup.org.za/article/help-disabled-children-immigrants/
Describe the project's impact
- Mobilization of resources to skill and empower refugee women with disabilities.
- Refugee women with disabilities providing for their families through sewing, making, and selling baskets.
- Preventing refugee women with disabilities from begging and sex work.
- Advocating for refugee women with disabilities in community committees.
How will you spend the R20,000 award if you win?
- Buy 2 extra sewing machines,
- More material for making more baskets
- Enlarge and improve the storage facility
- Improve the marketing strategy
- Revamp a wheelchair ramp at the project site for the project members and customers who use wheelchairs.
What do you hope to achieve?
- To reduce poverty and lack of livelihood opportunities among refugee women with disabilities in Cape Town.
- To restore the dignity of refugee women with disabilities, thus, equipping them with skills that will take them off the street corners, traffic lights, trains, and the central business district of Cape Town.
- Equip more refuge women living with disabilities with handwork skills in Cape Town.
- Reducing high competition over scarce resources among poorer communities leading to xenophobia.