Liberian News: Women Should Be Empowered To Cater For Their Children

By Mark N. Mengonfia

A nonprofit organization has called on people of goodwill to help in empowering women who will in return cater to their children and the economy.

Speaking at the graduation ceremony of the institution in Paynesville, Abandoned Child Foundation founder, Darius Dolo said when women are given the right skills, they will become help to the nation, mainly their kids.

Darius, who had suffered abandonment when he was a kid, said, “It was so difficult for us to come up. Our parents were not around when we sought education and other people helped us.”

The African Methodist Zion University graduate said upon his graduation many years back, he sought for job but could not get one adding that after many efforts, he resulted to doing his own initiative.

“I started doing laundry, washing people’s clothing for a small amount but as time went by, people started to again become a blessing to us,” he said.

According to him, helping kids and women is his own way of giving back to society.

When he was asked why he was focusing on women for the training instead of the children, Mr. Dolo said his institution has noticed that many women are left with their children to cater for them and as such, empowering the women will eventually become helpful for the kids.

He indicated that the short term tai & dai  and soap making training benefited women from far and near adding, “ I hope that other people will see this as a good venture to help women in their various communities so that they can become help to our children.”

He intoned that, since he was helped by others to attain an education, he was moved to give back to society by establishing the organization in 2018 with the aim of helping children in need.

He said, “I can say that we are achieving because since we started, we have impacted 150 children in Bong, Margibi and MontserradoCounties.”

Darius and his team have been reaching out to kids in need, helping them with their school fees as well as their school materials.

“We follow them both at home and in their various schools to ensure that our efforts are not going to waste,” he said.

Also speaking earlier, the program director for Abandoned Child Foundation, Marcus Wolosaid they noticed that there were lots of unskilled people with a very big skill market which has space to accommodate more skilled people in the society.

He said they intend to reach as many women with their training because there is a need to have more women empowered.

He said initially, many women applied for the training but some dropped along the way with 12 successfully graduating over the weekend.

According to him, women have shown interest in becoming skillful people; the only need now is for goodwill to help their organization with materials and other needs.

“We only charged them with a little amount of 500 but the training they have received lives with them for life time” Mr. Wolo said.

He encouraged the women to make maximum use of what they have learned to become help to their communities and the society in general.