Our History
Friends of Hope-Uganda (FOHU) was started in 2007 in the Rural town of Tororo in Uganda, one of the East African Country, to champion the cause of over 5000 vulnerable persons especially youth. Tororo District is estimated to have 2,230 people with roughly 300 families living below the poverty line. The population in the area has been growing, partly as a result of immigrant workers who come to Tororo due to the Cement Industry from neighboring Kenya and the increasing influx of truck drivers on the Trans- African highway, who find rest in our neighborhood.
There are very few opportunities for employment in the project area save for the cement industry where most school dropouts are employed as porters: Shockingly, only 8.7% of households receive employment income; 88.6% of the population survives on subsistence farming, without an earning to sustain and improve their livelihood. Famine and Hunger, which is rampant in the area, results in high susceptibility to disease and in extreme cases lack of full development of the mind and body. Coupled with extreme air and noise pollution from the cement factory and climate change due to changing weather patterns due traditional climatic perspectives, the community is in dire need for intervention from all these array of issues.
In 2009, Bernard conceived the idea to confront this vulnerability amongst most youth through education. After meeting Cathy Robinson Pickett and Garrett in Tanzania on a humanitarian hike of Africa’s tallest mountain in Tanzania along with Karen Brown and Julie Sprague all teachers in Florida, Bernard started Friends of Hope – Uganda, finally registering it as a local district nonprofit in Tororo-Uganda with registration number-YT/400575.