By Precious D Freeman
The West Point Women for Health and Development Organization (WPWHDO) has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the British Embassy in Liberia to train over 100 vulnerable Liberian petty business women in the country.
The MOU, according to WPWHDO’s Executive Director Nelly Cooper will empower petty business women in coping with the effects of the 3rd wave of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The project is aimed at providing support to female-headed households to recover from the effects of COVID-19 through capacity building initiatives and developmental skills training.
According to her, the training of the over 100 petty business women has commenced in the country with over 20 persons participating.
Speaking in an exclusive interview with this paper, Madam Cooper noted that the training will also improve and strengthen petty business women to enable them to operate bigger businesses and that the participants will be trained on how to save profits that will benefit not only themselves but their generations.
She added that, most often, small business women tend to sell one goods for over 20 years without any improvement, something she described as been rather disappointing but called on all participants to use the banking system to save their profits noting that it will save those ‘SUSU’ cards embarrassment.
She called on the participants to be vigilant during business and practice what they will learn from the training as it will help them improve, adding that with their improvement, Liberia will improve as well.
For his part, the British Ambassador to Liberia, Neil Bradley mentioned that they are pleased to work with WPWHDO in order to help small business women who were affected by Covid-19 to boost their small businesses through the skills they will acquire.
He added that the Government of Britain will help to provide the funding for these women who were affected by Covid-19 to increase their businesses.
In other news, Ambassador Sjostrom has reiterated the Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA) Support to WPWHDO in fighting Sexual Gender Based Violence (SGBV) crimes in West Point and by extension Liberia as a whole.
Ambassador Sjostrom was clear on the issue of SGBV crimes in Liberia with commitment in working with the WPWHDO led by Mrs. Nelly S. Cooper as Executive Directress.
The Swedish diplomat lauded the efforts and program put into place by WPWHDO to combat SGBV cases in the Township of West Point. He spoke in the Township of West Point recently when he paid a courtesy visit to WPWHDO to acquaint himself with ongoing activities being carried out by WPWHDO.
The Ambassador was taken on a guided tour of the West Point Beach, West Point resource center, amongst other facilities. At the same time, the Swedish diplomat was accompanied on the tour by an array of prominent citizens of the Township of West Point including elders, women and girls, amongst others.
Mrs. Cooper then provided an overview of Kvinna till Kvinna projects being executed by WPWHDO in West Point. Kvinna till Kvinna is the traditional sponsor of WPWHDO programs and based in Sweden.
Ambassador Sjostrom had the opportunity to listen from the various beneficiaries of WPWHDO programs, some of whom included community Male Action Group against SGBV crimes while Madam Cooper briefed the Ambassador on some of the programs being carried out by WPWHDO with the support of Kvinna till Kvinna and (SIDA).