Cofa / Creating Opportunities for All

Cofa makes grants to local organizations registered in sierra leone for community-building projects.

Growing family prosperitythis new, 12-month agricultural program aims to provide basic farming supplies and guidance to 30 households in six rural communities, to enable families to grow crops and thereby provide food for themselves, and sell the surplus to produce income. All supplies and salaries for the project manager, a trained agronomist, and extension workers are funded by Cofa. Participants receive field training from the project staff to grow rice, groundnuts, cucumbers, peppers, okra, cassava, and potatoes. In addition, each family will receive a pair of goats and chickens. Harvests and seed banking, for future crops, will take place over the course of the year, ending in late fall of 2023. Families will set aside some of the profits from each crop to purchase needed inputs for the next growing season. The goal is financial self-sufficiency after a year of support for each family.

Nourishing young minds and bodiesthis month-long school and feeding program operates during july-august, when food supplies are lowest and many people subsist on a single meal each day, and when the regular schools are closed. Initiated in 2020 in four schools and paid for privately by Cofa's founder and a gofundme campaign, in 2022 it received foundation funding to support classroom teaching and provide daily lunch in 11 schools in the lunsar region for more than 2,500 primary- and secondary-school students. The program provides a month's salary to the teachers and the local women who prepare the daily lunch. for the last two years, the project also supported local young men and women, previously unemployed, who grew the rice used for meals, on land rented by cofa.in addition, Cofa provided funding to construct a toilet building for one of the schools which had no toilet facility for students or teachers.

Bike librariesin sierra leone, girls are at greater risk for dropping out of school, and one reason is the difficulty in getting to school. There is no transport offered, and in rural areas, it can be more than five miles each way. In the past 10 years, the village bike project has established "bike libraries" at a number of schools, focusing mainly on girls, to facilitate their attendance. Cofa is teaming with the village bike project to support and expand the vbp's existing bike libraries into the rural port loko district, and to offer bikes to both boys and girls who need them.

Expanding access to clean watercofa has teamed with waterstep, a us-based non-profit, to increase access to clean water in the region. Waterstep generously donated chlorination and bleach-making equipment for 11 installations. Once established, the only consumable needed is simple table salt. Each station requires an additional investment for storage containers and batteries to power the chlorination equipment, plus a small monthly stipend to the project manager. These stations are providing clean water at schools and health facilities, and many neighborhoods around lunsar. Separate generators have also been supplied that produce bleach, which can be sold to health facilities and households, to offset costs.

King kama lunches and teacher stipends, mile 91 building, adama school supplies:providing needed lunches for students at the king kama school plus teacher stipends and needed school supplies.