With your support, we can educate and train women to become beekeepers, leaders, and entrepreneurs.
We can educate and train women to become skilled beekeepers, leaders and entrepreneurs.
Your donation will empower women through beekeeping, and create Beekeepers for Life.
CREATING BEEKEEPERS FOR LIFE
Image: Nigeria, Sakoto Women’s Beekeeping Project
We are launching a new initiative to empower women through beekeeping.
We aim to build a network of women-led beekeeping cooperatives in Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania and Uganda.
Rural women have encountered many barriers to becoming beekeepers, from its perception as an all-male domain and a lack of capital to access training and purchase hives and bee suits.
We recognise the power of beekeeping to change lives by providing a sustainable income and livelihood.
Over the last 21 years, Bees Abroad has led the way in helping rural women become skilled, confident beekeepers. Over one-third of our 34 active community projects, in Africa, are run either entirely or mostly by women.
These projects have successfully aided poverty relief through sales of honey, empowering participants through our proven three-year training and mentoring cycles.
We plan to expand these communities of women beekeepers in regional clusters of 4-5 communities across Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania and Uganda.
To achieve and fund this initiative, we are working to raise a total of £200,000.
Mount Rwenzori Honey Bees Farmers’ Cooperative is the first of our new projects, based in the remote area of Mount Rwenzori in Uganda. The cooperative has 150 women members. Many head single parent families having lost their husbands to local civil unrest or disease, such as AIDS. We will establish a community apiary, owned by the cooperative members. This will serve as a hub, training newcomers to beekeeping, and training future community trainers.
The apiary will provide employment and revenue. Revenue from honey sales will be used to provide hives and equipment to members of the cooperative as they continue their training. Once trained, and harvesting honey, members will share their revenues with the cooperative, enabling a programme of reinvestment in new hives and further training.
Creating Beekeepers for Life, a sustainable training cycle and income, driven by the community itself.
The cooperative will benefit from advice and the lessons learned from a nearby Bees Abroad Women’s Project – the Mount Rwenzori Rural Talent project. This project is centred around an enthusiastic and ambitious woman led cooperative.
We work with communities, training and supporting them to build a sustainable income for life, through beekeeping.
The common objectives revealed through our women’s projects include the determination to seek a level of economic independence, the desire to improve their position in society and the prioritization of family care through food security, medicine and education.
Beekeeping provides many different pathways to meeting these objectives whilst building self esteem and community cohesion.
Climate change forced men to migrate further away, with herds, in search of pasture.
The 20 strong all women’s group established hives but relied initially on the men to harvest the honey.
With Bees Abroad mentoring, the group made its own suits from gunny sacks giving themselves independence and control of the harvesting.
The Sinyati Women’s Group in Kenya now make skincare products, including lip balm, that they sell through cooperative outlets. This is filling the gap in household income caused by the effect of climate change on Pastoral Herding.
Bees Abroad
The Keepers
Symn Lane
Wotton-under-Edge
Gloucestershire
GL12 7BD, UK
Telephone: (+44) 07942 815753
Info@beesabroad.org.uk
