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Learn more about the Kupata Project.
The Kupata Project
I really hope you have managed to find five minutes to watch our video. The pictures certainly paint more than any words I can come up with.
There is no escaping the fact we Brits did some pretty bad things in Africa. For hundreds of years, we robbed the continent of everything that wasn’t screwed to the floor. Over ten million slaves, gold, silver, cocoa, rubber, oil….it’s a long and shameful list. And when there was nothing left to steal, we left in an undignified hurry.
We certainly didn’t leave the place as we found it. Our legacy is toxic to say the least. Apartheid Soth Africa, corruption riddled Nigeria, bottomless brutality in Zimbabwe, and millions of Africans living under a seemingly endless procession of despotic regimes.
Over recent decades we have started to try to make things right. The people of our islands have sent hundreds of millions of pounds worth of aid to Africa. Sadly, even this process has become rather tainted. We read too many stories about bloated charities with fancy London offices and senior staff pulling in the kind of salaries normally associated with merchant bankers. Recent scandals at Oxfam and Save the Children have made things even worse.
Too many people who instinctively want to help find themselves asking awkward questions. If I donate £10, how much will actually make it to Africa? To the people who need it? And how much off will go to paying for all those fancy offices and salaries? And how much will be siphoned off by corruption on the ground?
These are very real questions and they demand and deserve very real answers. So what assurances can the Kupata Project give you?
Happily, we can give you plenty.
Here goes.
We have NO office.
We have NO telephone bills, heating bills, no overheads of any kind. We have NO paid staff.
There will be NO travel expenses for trips to Uganda.
We only have ONE overhead cost. Every year we will have to pay our accountants to prepare a set of accounts to meet the requirements of the Scottish Charity Regulator.
And that’s it. All of it.
Every penny after our accountancy bill will go to buying sanitary ware for school girls in the Kabale region of Uganda.
One last point.
We are not in the business of handing out sticking plasters. Every penny you donate is an investment which will help these girls to carve out a better future. Africans are leaving us for dead when it comes to educating themselves. The things they manage to do with their mobile phones are quite simply unbelievable.
They use their mobiles to trade their crops and to run micro economies. They have created a mobile phone based banking systen from absolute scratch. Young Africans are even completing online Harvard degrees using their mobile phones. Africa is full of the kind of impatient energy we must have had in the early days of our Industrial Revolution. Every day, they find new ways to innovate their way through seemingly impossible challenges.
School is utterly vital. School provides the essential tools. The basics. The reading and the writing. The sacrifices families make to pay for their kids to get a High School education are truly humbling. Tragically there is never any spare cash left to pay for sanitary ware which means the girls are missing up to 25% of their education.
A huge problem. But a very straight forward problem. A very straight forward problem with a very simple solution. Which is where we come in. Which is where we can offer a leg up.
£6 pays for a year’s worth of sanitary ware for one of these Ugandan school girls.
And if you donate £6 to the Kupata Project, that is exactly what your £6 will be spent on.
A year’s worth of sanitary ware for a school girl in Uganda.
And then it is over to them. They will continue to duck and dive and innovate in ways we can only wonder at. They will be more imaginative than we can comprehend. Africa’s vibrant countries of young people have a unique chance to jump start an aging developed world which is slowly but surely losing its way.
The Kupata Project is all about making a small but genuine difference. Our job is straight forward. We will make sure every penny we receive arrives in a Ugandan High School in the form of sanitary ware.
This is our promise to you.
The Kupata Project is a charity registered in Scotland. You can check us out at the site of the Scottish Charity Regulator here.