Pro Africa is a Christian organization dedicated to working with orphans and vulnerable children, families, and their communities by empowering them to reach their God-given full potential, to God’s glory.
Pro Africa is a Christian organization dedicated to working with orphans and vulnerable children, families, and their communities by empowering them to reach their God-given full potential, to God’s glory.
The Pro Africa project continued to grow in both countries in some well-defined ways:
Currently the number of adopted children is around 500. The numbers fluctuate because some of the children get out of the program after a number of years (graduate from school, find a job), and other new kids join the program.
In Kenya, the work unfolds in three centers: Ruaka, Nyeri, and Thangati. These centers are several hours away from each other, and in each center there is a team of volunteers. The teams are coordinated by Pastor Bernard Kabaru from Ruaka. In Tanzania, the work is even more spread out because of the long distances. The center of coordination is in Iringa, and there are some other centers, such as Tukuyu, Dar es Salaam, Mbozi, and Mbeya, the place where the missionary David Livingstone worked 150 years earlier.
Here is some specific information on the existing needs of Kenya and Tanzania. Kenya is an east-African country with a population of 45 million people; Tanzania is its southern neighbor, with a population of 49 million people. In both countries 50 percent of the population is under the age of 15. Most families have5 or 6 children. The rate of inflation is 50%.
The Kenyan political arena is often shaped by tribal tensions. Although both countries received Christianity back in the colonial times, tribal traditions are still strongly permeated by witchcraft and animism. In Tanzania 30% of the population is Christian, 40% is Muslim; in Kenya the Christian population is much larger, about 80%, but in both countries a large part of Christians are nominal, their faith being mixed with Animism, in which witchcraft finds a significant place.
Poverty is a major problem in both countries. Although Kenya is one of the African countries with a relatively high income per capita, most of the wealth is concentrated in the hands of a small upper class. In both countries the income of 50% of the population is below one dollar a day. An unskilled worker who toils the whole day in construction or agriculture earns between one and a half and two and a half dollars a day. In order to understand what that means we give you the amount of work time needed for some of the products:
More than 15 million Kenyans do not have access to clean water, and the situation is worse in Tanzania. Access to clean water is just a dream to many; children and women walk miles every day to find a water source.
Both countries are plagued by droughts, malnutrition, diseases (malaria, yellow fever, typhoid fever, cholera, hepatitis A, HIV-AIDS- a malady with epidemic proportions in these countries. For instance, there are more than 2 million orphans in Kenya only because of AIDS that killed their parents). Infant mortality is extremely high and still growing. There are regions where the mortality rate under the age of 5 is 245 per 1,000 live births. In other words, a child dies every two minutes. Many people do not have adequate medical care; there are regions where there is only one medical doctor for a population of 150,000 people. Therefore, access to medical care is almost impossible for most of these people.
One of the main causes of malnutrition is the diet limited to only one type of food called ugali. It is maize flour mixed with water (and boiled, if there is money for fuel). Many children do not have even this type of food; often their diet is limited to a cup of tea a day.