Shropshire Health for Africa Project (SHAPE) is a small charity run by volunteers loosely based around the medical centre in Church Stretton, South Shropshire. (Charity No. 1124253).
Our aim is to help people in Africa gain access to good primary health care:
We are young organisation: our history provides an introduction
February 2007. A group of friends and colleagues, aware of the gulf in health provision between the richer and the poorer nations, meet to discuss how they can help. In the poorest countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, many of the diseases from which both adults and children die are easy and cheap to both treat and prevent if the right knowledge, medicines and equipment are available. The group thought that a locally based charity could mobilise funds and skills that would help to bridge this gulf.
July 2007. We meet with representatives of SUNARMA, an Ethiopian non-governmental organisation (see www.sunarma.org), and its sister organisation SUNARMA UK, a UK registered charity. SUNARMA is a sustainable resources organisation, working with rural families to build long term solutions to the social and environmental pressure resulting from population increase and climate change. They had recognised that poor access to primary healthcare was an important contributing factor.
September-October 2007. Work begins setting up the structures needed to become a charity. We envisage an organisation that will work in partnership with rural communities in Africa to support and provide primary medical care and health education, whilst at the same time developing community-to-community links and increasing awareness in our own community of the difficulties faced by those in the developing world. Fund raising begins: a quiz-night in Church Stretton results in people having a lot of fun - and our first £500 in the bank.
November 2007. Three of us spend 10 days in Ethiopia with SUNARMA and SUNARMA UK as they reviewed their projects. They took us to the communities with which they are working, explained their work, helped us understand some of the challenges people were facing and arranged many meetings for us with healthcare workers, government officers (local, regional and federal) and other charities. We are grateful to everyone at SUNARMA and SUNARMA UK for fitting us into their busy schedule and to the many people we met with who gave their time to explain their work and answer our questions. For photographs and more information about what we saw click here.
December 2007. The fact finding team report back. With SUNARMA we had identified an area where an organisation like SHAPE could help and had made some estimates of the costs involved. We agreed with SUNARMA that it was unwise to engage in further contact with the community or local administration until we had raised sufficient funds to plan actions and discuss implementation and had established a fundraising strategy that would ensure our continued support. We set a target of £20,000 to be reached before commencing work.
January 2008. We submit our application for registration to the Charities Commission. Thanks to continued fundraising, and especially to some substantial individual donations, we had reached the £2,000 in the bank required for registration. Our application is returned to us - as of 1 January the minumum funds had been raised to £5,000. We continued fundraising.
May 2008. Shropshire Health for Africa Project (SHAPE) is registered with the Charities Commission. Community fundraising activities and further individual donations had allowed a re-submission of our application. Thank you to everyone for their efforts to reach this 'interim' financial target. We are now also registered with HMRC to claim Gift Aid on donations
October 2008. Fund raising is proceeding steadily and we are building up the organisation to sustain this. We hope to reach our target soon and plan to commence work on the ground during 2009. More importantly we are encouranged by the support from our local community and beyond which gives us confidence that we will be able to sustain the initial involvement and can hope to develop our activities in the future.
Next steps.
The people in the project area have had a terrible year following failure of the rains this spring, and many were forced to eat the grain kept as seed for the next sowing.
Our local partner SUNARMA, though not a relief organisation, has stepped in and used its staff
on the ground and supporters in the UK to find and buy seed. It is now turning this into a sustainable resource by
establishing seed banks where seed, returned after the harvest by those to whom it was donated, will be kept for future use.
Read about it here.
This crises may, understandably, have diverted local government resources away from health care.
During their visit to the area in November this year SUNARMA UK will re-assess the priorities for SHAPE
and start to establish contacts in the community and the local government offices in preparation for us beginning work on the ground in 2009.
Latest News - December 2009
During 2009 we reached our initial fund raising target.
This was required so that we can promise to do things in Ethiopia knowing that we already have the money.
A group from SHAPE has just returmed from visiting Ethiopia to re-assess priorities in Sirti. We will report on plans for 2010 in the New Year