Lift Up Africa

In 2004, friends Bill Longbrake, Rick Levy and Sam Muinde formed Lift Up Africa (LUA) to create sustainable development projects leading to independence and community ownership. We provide a hand up not a hand out. LUA works closely with African communities on sustainable projects that concentrate on basic needs such as clean water, health care, reliable and sustainable food and energy sources, education, and employment.

Lift Up Africa partnered with Solar Cookers International to distribute CooKits to Maasai women in Orinie.

LUA's current projects include:

• Kaliluni Medical Centre (KMC), Kaliluni, Kenya. KMC is a complex that includes a hospital, visiting doctors/nurses quarters, and a funeral home. Once construction has been completed, the local community will manage all aspects of functional operations.
  

Turkana women in Lokichoggio, Kenya making CooKits as part of a project supported by Lift Up Africa.

• Rural Wind Power. A replicable, small scale rural electrification project using wind to bring electricity for lighting to small village near Lake Victoria that will never be on a national grid.
  

• Peaceful Home For Children Construction Project. Peaceful Home is a new orphanage project located in the Kianyaga area near Mt Kenya. LUA is helping raise funds to complete construction work on housing for the orphans.
  

• Kenya Community Centre for Learning (KCCL) Sustainabilty Project. KCCL is East Africa’s first middle/high school catering to the unique educational and social needs of students with learning disabilities and a variety of special needs. The school, which receives no support from the Kenyan government, recently set a program in motion to make it self-sufficient. LUA is supporting this transitional effort.
  

• New Solar Cooking Projects. LUA is partnering with SCI (EA) on several new solar cooking projects, including two in northern Tanzania and a distribution to three women's groups in southern Kenya's Kajaido District.
  
  

Past projects include:

• Lokichoggio Solar Cooking Projects. LUA supported several projects in Loki, including a project that trained 20 Turkana women to make and use CooKits, a small portable solar cooker, and the installation of three (3) commerical solar cookers at St. John’s Primary School, an area school that provides provides breakfast and lunch for up to 1,500 children daily.
  

• Maasai Solar Cooking Projects. A LUA grant provided fireless cookers, WAPIs, and CooKits to a group of mostly illiterate Maasai women living in southern Kenya's Kajaido district.
  

• Hamomi Children's Centre Solar Cooking. Hamomi is a primary school and orphan support project in Nairobi's Kangemi Slum. A LUA grant provided solar cooking equipment for their critical feeding program.
  
  

News and Recent Developments in LUA's Solar Cooking Projects

• Upcoming for 2009: Lift Up Africa will be supporting several new solar cooking projects in northern Tanzania. The Tanzania projects will provide solar cooking equipment to two secondary schools and demonstrate solar cooking to people living in the area. These projects serve indigenous, mostly Maasai people.

• February 2009: LUA sent funds to Solar Cookers International East Africa Office (SCI-EA) to support distribution of solar cooking equipment to three women's groups in southern Kenya's Kajiado District. Since July 2005, SCI-EA has been working with these three women’s groups to promote the use of solar cooking as a means to help these women save their meager resources for other pressing needs. All 54 women from these three groups are widows or single parents who need group support to move forward with their lives. These three groups devised a way to purchase solar cooking materials for each member. However, this system is slow. At the time LUA made its grant, 23 members had not received the materials they needed to begin using solar cooking, and many others still needed painted black pots to enable them to fully realize the maximum benefit from their cookers. Because of LUA's grant, these women finally received the full complement of energy technology tools they needed to enhance their energy savings and improve their living standards. When extended families are taken into consideration, more than 424 people benefitted from this project.

• January 2009: In late January, the Hamomi Children's Centre, a school located in Nairobi's Kangemi Slum, took delivery of the solar cooking equipment LUA's grant purchased for them. SCI staff delivered the equipment and demonstrated solar cooking at Hamomi. Hamomi's Development Director Susie Marks reported: "A crowd began gathering, staring, asking questions to the mzungu, (white person-that's Susie), who they didn't believe was just as clueless as them, no matter how I protested my lack of knowledge about the cookers....They found it pretty amusing that I was helping clean vegetables. And the demonstration began. SCI staff made rice, beans, boiled eggs (solared eggs?), a vegetable stew, and even a cake! We learned that we can pasteurize water with the solar cooker! We are still learning if the dirty river by the school can actually get clean and we will be testing the water...but if this will work, we will suddenly have free clean water, not only for us but for the entire community. Parents and guardians can come get water for their households and stop drinking from the river which leads to awful diseases....The Hamomi staff gathered round during the demonstration, learning and patiently asking all the right questions, while the crowd around them fluctuated, sometimes growing so big that people needed to take turns getting up to where the cookers were to touch the panels and feel how hot they were getting." More than 100 students, mostly orphans, benefitted from this project.

• September 2008: Thanks to funding provided by two boys, one eleven and one seventeen, LUA made a small grant to the Hamomi Children's Centre in Nairobi's Kangemi Slum. The grant was for the purchase of solar cooking equipment to augment Hamomi's critical feeding program.

• August 2008: The Kaliluni Medical Centre (KMC) hosted a second, very well-attended solar cooking demonstration for their local community.

• June 2008: The Kaliluni Medical Centre (KMC), a Lift Up Africa project, hosted a demonstration of solar cooking for their local community. The KMC project is working with local community leaders bring Solar Cooker International's Stella Odaba to Kaliluni for the demonstration. KMC is also developing funding to install solar panels on the hospital building and commercial solar cookers on the hospital building.

• April 2008: Altener Solar Ltd. transported and installed three (3) commercial solar cookers to St. John's Primary School of Lokichoggio, Kenya. The installation had been delayed because driving from Nairobi, where the cookers were fabricated, to the Loki area was unsafe due Kenya's post-election violence. Funding for this project was provided by Lift Up Africa and was our second Loki solar cooking project.

Contact

Linda Alband, CAO
Lift Up Africa
POB 301206
Portland, Oregon 97294
USA

Toll Free: 1 (888) 8LiftUp (USA only)
Telephone: +1 (503) 408-6838
Fax: +1 (503) 408-5766

info@liftupafrica.org
http://www.liftupafrica.org