“The problems that I thought were just for our church or region (widows, orphans, marginalization) are found everywhere” commented one of the delegates at the recent Covenant World Relief (CWR) conference on community development. In response to the question “What do you know that you didn’t know before? delegates commented on:
attendees carefully listening
- the very large capacity of women in community development in Cameroon, Kenya or South Africa.
- impressed by the breadth and quality of the work being done in relation to CWR
- it’s like women are leading the take-off for Africa to fly
- it’s important to reinforce the capacity of our staff
- I’ve been given many tools by our friends
- I will look at what we’ve been doing in the mirror of what I learned here.
small group discussion
27 delegates from 10 countries attended the first ever CWR conference for their partners across Africa. Representatives came from: South Africa, Kenya (2 organizations), South Sudan & Ethiopia, France, DR Congo (2 organizations), Cameroon, Central African Republic, Haiti and the US. The conference was held Nov 7-13 in Bamenda, NW Province, Cameroon. We were wonderfully hosted at the Cameroon Baptist Convention’s guest house and conference center.
the conference attendees
This conference is the third to complete CWR Director David Husby’s vision of gathering together representatives from CWR partners in different regions ofthe world to share story. Dave believes that a critical way to build the capacity of the CWR partners is for them to learn from each other. The first two conferences were for Latin American and Asian partners and were held in those areas of the world in 2012 and 2013 respectively.
Matthew Jock presenting on disaster response from South Sudan
Each of the 10 organizations represented gave a principle based presentation coming from the kind of work they are doing. Topics included: women’s savings and loans, self-help groups, community organizing, disaster response, women’s empowerment, community health evangelism, agriculture development, the impact of climate change on the local environment and on agricultural development, peace making and conflict resolution and more. The presentations were stimulating, challenging and informative. They always provoked numerous additional conversations between delegates.
visit to the Nazareth agricultural center
Two mornings of the conference were devoted to site visits in the area. Divided into smaller groups we visited Water for Cameroon, a village savings and loan group, a reforestation project, an agricultural development organization and a 22 year old local NGO, SIRDEP, that is working on several initiatives.
