CHAPS

Community Health Africa Poverty Solutions

Our 2024 focus: Family Planning

For 2024, the generous donors to CHAPS have enabled Communities Health Africa Trust to field 12 Family Planning (FP) outreach counselors in Northern Kenya.  These 12 counselors will be spread across the underserved regions of northern Kenya with their outreach bringing family planning information and counseling to the nomadic tribes in their home encampments.  

Several large funders have moved into the Nanyuki, Kenya area but are focused on outreach in the slums and close in villages.  While this is valuable activity, it is in the remote areas that family planning can have a huge impact.

By spacing the arrival of babies by a few years, the family will have much healthier children and mothers will be more able to care for the family in the face of adversity such as drought.  The use of family planning also means that the girls can finish schooling.  The effort to bring family planning to these areas began 25 years ago and there are now positive signs of success:

The saying “Educate a boy and you educate a man, educate a girl and you educate a family” is being proven over and over again.  The elders can see how much better the children of educated mothers do in school and are giving permission for school age girls to use family planning.

With the children separated by a few years it means fewer children are born.  By reducing the pressure on the environment to feed an overwhelming population, human wildlife conflict is reduced, and the degradation of the ecosystem is moderated.

Guidestar Silver Ranking

Chaps is now designated Silver Rating by Guidestar.  We are looking at moving up to a Gold rating but at present it would require us to spend significant funds on an accounting audit.  Should we find a volunteer who can audit our very simple books we will revisit the question.  In the mean time those funds will be spent in support of family planning.

What We Do

CHAPS provides direct funding to remote clinics that have proven to be effective in their environment. These clinics receive only small amounts of funding from large programs and we endeavor to fill in the gaps. You may direct your donations to one of the following categories of funding:  Family Planning, general healthcare, clinic operations, unrestricted funds.