Starting a new life, Productive & Resilient Livelihoods

Our success stories are many but we highlight a few in our program areas. Our purpose in sharing these success stories is to encourage the youth, women and other vulnerable groups to take action and contribute to the development of the communities.

Barwaaqo Project is built on the foundation of collective compassion found in communities in crises. This approach aims to strengthen and scale up existing initiatives already started by community members through providing microgrants.

This means that the solutions and the desire to survive and recover come from the community members themselves. Many of the groups that we have worked with have been helping each other for years without aid agencies’ involvement.

HANET’s role is to build on this generosity, already embedded within the community values. It helps us promote and build resilience in the communities towards emergency situations.  It also means that the collective spirit of support from these community groups continues with or without HANET providing support in their efforts.

We are also working with the community members themselves to ‘un-learn’ how to ask for help. These active local community groups are amazing and have been doing voluntary charity for years on their own – the real first-line responders – it comes with the continuous crisis context.

This is a powerful message to all of us. That solutions are already there; we need to give space for them to grow.  Each neighbor is taking a risk to give of themselves, so imagine how much more they can do with a little more monetary support. We are investing in the communities’ collective compassion and their own homegrown philanthropy. We only want to add value to scale up and strengthen the support.

We want to thank our supporters on our journey with the Barwaaqo approach in Somalia:

We believe that this is what locally-led work should look like.