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.

Autumn 2008 The people in the project area 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, 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.

December 2008 This crises may, understandably, have diverted local government resources away from health care. It also took a great deal of time for SUNARMA's staff. During their visit to the area in November SUNARMA UK will re-assessed the priorities for SHAPE and started to establish contacts in the community and the local government offices in preparation for us beginning work on the ground.

Summer 2009 Fund raising continued apace but it was taking some time to set up the structures needed to work in Ethiopia. Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) operate within a formal framework. SHAPE is too small an organisation to carry the overhead of registering as an NGO in Ethiopia so we need to do our work through an implementation partner. SUNARMA is suitable for many aspects but we need to incorporate specific healthcare skills. Over the summer we and SUNARMA get advice from several small organisation working succesfully this way.

October 2009 We reach our initial fund-raising target - we can now promise to do things in Ethiopia knowing that the money is there.

December 2009 Another group from SHAPE go to Ethiopia with a firm plan: to work with SUNARMA as partner on some things and with the local government Health and Education departments on others. SUNARMA arrange a meeting with the government officers. Before that we have several useful meetings in Addis - we are grateful to staff of Save the Children UK and Water Aid Ethiopia for sparing us some of their time. Advice in the UK from For Ethiopia (www.for-ethiopia.com), a charity with similar aims who are working with local government departments, was also very valuable.

We meet with staff from the Health, Education and Womens & Childrens Affairs offices (the last is roughly equivalent to 'Social Services'). They explain what they do and the difficulties we face. We have a tour of the Health Centre then visit a primary school and a Health Post in construction in a small community. We come away a lot of information to digest - we need to identify things that are high on their list of priorities, match our aims as a charity and are practical for us to do in partnership with the local government. Lack of access to clean water and sanitation is a recurrent theme, but we think that is best addressed in conjunction with SUNARMA.

Latest News - June 2010

After a period of silence whilst we decide what to do and aggree it with the wereda administration and SUNARMA we are ready to start !

For more information go to the Projects page.