Youth Rise International, a Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO) with focus on empowering the poor and socially-excluded has launched a project to empower over 200 poor single mothers from 20 deprived communities in the Central Region.

Dubbed “Help Single Mothers” Project, the beneficiaries would be provided with emergency food supply, medical care, training in livelihood skills and seed capital to set up a micro-venture of their choice.

They would be trained on how to manufacture locally made hand sanitizers, liquid soaps, nose masks, veronica buckets among others which were of huge market demand in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Speaking in an interview with the Ghana News Agency (GNA), Mr David Awusi, Executive Director of Youth Rise International said thousands of single mothers in rural communities struggled daily to care for their children due to poverty and difficulties of single parenting.

He added that the outbreak of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic had worsened the plights of single mothers, hence the decision to roll out the project to help them sail through the pandemic and beyond.

According to Mr Awusi, children of poor single mothers became victims of child slavery, child trafficking and child marriages.

He said the single parents were willing to work and earn an income to care for their children and therefore all they required was a little assistance to better their lives.

With this Project, Mr Awusi hoped that hundreds of families would be preserved and empowered to work themselves out of poverty in the long run.

He said the vulnerable children in such families would be protected and given the opportunity to enjoy better education, health care and childhood.

Eventually, he added that those children would have brighter future and thereby break the generational cycle of poverty in their families and communities and also bring an end to child labour, trafficking and early marriages.