HFTEMU currently pursues the following programme Interventions.
Spiritual nurture. HFTEMU undertakes fellowships and individual home based prayers with the beneficiary seniors. This is aimed at bringing hope to the lives of the seniors who are in most cases dejected but also prepare them to have a relationship with Jesus Christ since they are in their terminal days.
Seniors social welfare support. Many of the seniors under our care are needy without the ability to regularly and consistently avail themselves the most basic of their needs such as soap, sugar, paraffin and food. While we currently don’t reach all our beneficiaries with every basic need, HFTEMU provides some of the seniors with basic supplies such as soap, sugar salt, paraffin and lighting. This makes them feel loved and appreciated giving them more hope in life and a purpose of living.
Home visits and Outreaches. We conduct several home visits to the various homes of our seniors. While many are planned, some are spontaneous to evaluate their conditions of stay and needs on a normal day. A lot still has to be done to improve on the seniors’ welfare. Many don’t get the care they wanted from their attendants while some were not attended to at all times. This put their lives at risk.
Health care interventions. Our experience revealed that good health care and attention was the seniors’ highest priority need. Their health regularly fluctuates and needs regular attention. We try to get some of the seniors’ health attended to in clinics and hospitals. Our plan however is to run a fully fledged health scheme where the seniors simply check-in at partner hospitals on a customized arrangement. We also have plans to run our own health facility at the seniors’ center.
Advocating for seniors rights and needs. HFTEMU is building a strong base and linkages to strongly advocate for the rights and needs of seniors particularly at the local level in Tororo but also foster advocacy efforts at National level. Through its outreaches, public functions and private interactions, the HFTEMU leadership is playing a growing role in making the plight, needs and rights of Seniors known. As a result of these initiatives, many individuals and corporate bodies are expected to come up to support our cause and work.
Beneficiaries.
HFTEMU currently is supporting 40 seniors in the above areas. This includes 28 women and 12 men in various areas of Tororo. There more women than men seniors and in comparative terms, women were established to be in more deplorable conditions often with no care but instead shouldering the burden of taking care of grandchildren that are abandoned with them. Our support however is still largely limited to spiritual, emotional and basic needs provision at very minimal terms and should be scaled up to create impact.
Prospects.
We also intend to nurse prospects of constructing two shallow wells as a means of addressing the local water crisis which translates into hardship and poor health for the elderly who hardly have the energy to trek long distances to fetch the water once we get funding for it.
We intend to address food security among our target beneficiaries by undertaking quality and modern agricultural production on 5 acres of land that will work as production and demonstration units for modern agricultural production initiatives in drought prone areas.
We intend to buy 3 hectares of land and construct office and community centre where the elderly can hold their meetings from other than sitting under a mango tree, whereby when it rains it becomes so challenging.
We will focus on ongoing care for the health and general needs of the seniors. We will continue offering the social welfare and health improvements initiatives to the seniors.
Hope For The Elderly Ministries Uganda’s operations will be scaled up through its increased partnerships with organizations and individuals pursuing similar programmes such as Reach the Aged for better synergy and advantages that accrue from such partnerships.
We intend to recruit fulltime technical staff at the secretariat and increase the number of field volunteers to attend to the needs of the seniors. This will enhance the organizational capacity to deliver better services to the seniors under its care.