Network for Africa has submitted its application for The Big Give’s annual flagship event – The Big Give Christmas Challenge 2024.
With your kindness and support last year, you helped us reach our target of £20,000 for our mental health project in Rwanda, enabling another 250+ genocide survivors to receive counselling. We would like to try and match this sum in 2024.
Our first target is to raise £5k in pledges or promises of funding (see below). If you would like to support our counselling programme in Rwanda (now in its 8th year) and help us to build our pledge pot, we would love to hear from you. Please visit our contact page to get in touch.
How the Big Give Winter Challenge works
The Big Give Winter Challenge is an annual match funding campaign that Network for Africa has taken part in since 2012.
The initial match funds come from two sources –
- Network for Africa needs to secure promises of funding (also known as pledges) over the summer (which are then collected in the winter); and
- A Big Give Champion who contributes to the match fund.
This collective pot is used to double donations from online supporters when the campaign goes live.
Progress So Far
Please see what Network for Africa and our partner SURF have been able to achieve in previous years, thanks to our supporters and the donations they made.
From 2017 to 2023
During this period, you have helped Network for Africa to raise over £158,000 for our SURF project in Rwanda. While the 1994 Rwandan genocide is well known, less understood is the conflict’s lingering impact on survivors’ mental health and therefore their ability to lead normal lives and support themselves. Many orphans had to raise their siblings, some are single mothers, and others have been cheated out of their inherited property by distant relatives and strangers. The funds have helped to train Rwandan counsellors and lay counsellors so they can provide counselling to genocide orphans, in fortnightly group therapy sessions and one-to-one counselling.
In the years 2012 – 2016
You helped Network for Africa to raise over £70,000 for our Patongo Counselling Community Outreach (PCCO) programme in northern Uganda, where the recent civil war left many people traumatised. The PCCO transformed people’s lives by alleviating the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder and its associated social and economic problems.
Our Big Give Champions
Network for Africa is grateful to our Big Give Champions who have helped us to raise large sums of money over the years through their donations:
The Coles-Medlock Foundation | Friends of the Reed Foundation | Human Rights Fund | Reed Foundation – International | The Step Up Fund