Helping the Community

We strive to benefit the lives of our children through a number of community-based projects held throughout the year. Read more about some of our past projects below:

Christmas benefit

The Udukoro Empowerment Organization hosts a benefit every Christmas season, where children from across the village of Afara gather together for celebration. During this all day affair, the kids participate in a number of festivities hosted by an MC, and some children set up performances to entertain each other. The children also enjoy masquerade performances and traditional dances from the village’s local dance group. When the celebration concludes, each child is provided with a Christmas bundle that contains a toy and a piece of academic material (notebook, bookbag, etc). This is our friendly way of reminding the kids that while we are here to celebrate the Christmas season, we’re right back to school in a few weeks or so. Our record number in 2016 was 400+ children, only to be broken in 2017 with around 500 from across the village. We hope to continue to bring joy and pleasure to the hearts of our children for future Christmas' to come.

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school donations

In 2017, the organization partnered with Union School Afara and contributed a number of donations to the education program. These donations included 120 notebooks, 50 reading books, 100 pens and pencils, 4 new desks, and 2 new chalk boards. We hope to expand our school outreach in the upcoming school years.

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TUTORING

In 2017, we launched our tutoring program by taking 16 kids from Union School Afara and hiring two teachers for extra tutoring. We focused on mostly math and reading, and tutoring session ran for an hour and a half on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Moving forward, we plan on having our tutoring program run on Saturdays from 9 am to 12 pm.

Scholarship

One of the newest and most ambitious projects that the organization will pursue in the upcoming year is our secondary school scholarship program. This program will be in collaboration with our tutoring service, where we will take a select number of children who score well on the secondary school entrance exam and sponsor their education in the top private schools of Abia State. While the creation of this project is still in the works, the Udukoro Empowerment Organization has previously provided financial support for the academic pursuits of some students. We are very excited to launch as soon as we can.

covid-19 relief

In order to mitigate the adverse effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, we focused our efforts on providing pandemic relief for Afara from April through August of 2020. With the help of volunteers, we succeeded in sewing over 400 masks to ensure the safety of villagers navigating the close quarters of local marketplaces. We also donated food bundles to those who were most afflicted by the pandemic, which include caregivers, elderly, and the sick. While this initiative is not within our typical service model, we believe that our efforts preserved the health and well-being of Afara families during these troubling times.

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Udukoro Community Center

We are currently in the process of building out and renovating another new initiative, the Udukoro community center. This purpose of the center is to provide an optimal learning environment where Afara children can utilize various resources to suit their academic needs. It will serve as a workspace for students to complete schoolwork, a mini library for students to read from a variety of genres, and a medium for us to continue our tutoring in mathematics and reading. We hope to conclude the last of our renovations within the next few weeks.