Need For The Project

Ideally, the elderly in any community are taken care of by their retirement benefits or grown-up offspring, close relatives and benevolent members of that community. The situation in some cases is not ideal; some of the elderly are poverty stricken, lack medical care and proper shelter and live on the brink of starvation. These elderly may be broadly classified in the following way:

〈Many of the elderly never worked in jobs that provide retirement benefits and thus have no pension to fall back on.

〈Some have no children to take care of them, either because they never had any to begin with, or they may have had children who have been incapacitated or died before their time. In many cases this is due to HIV-AIDS, wars, alcoholism and other reasons.

〈Others wave offspring who have abandoned them because they cannot afford to maintain their parents’ up-keep due to poverty. These offspring mainly live in urban areas and are usually unemployed, or have jobs that pay very little, or may even be incarcerated.

〈Still others have offspring with average paying jobs who send up-keep every now and then, but never enough to handle the needs of their parent(s).

The lives of these elderly people are characterized by lack of food, inadequate shelter and medical services. Many of them depend on subsistence farming for their food, and considering their age and low energy levels, the yield from their agriculture is very low, which means they lack food a lot of the time. Add to this the prevailing drought conditions which are present for most of the year, resulting in poor yield from agriculture, the situation is indeed dire.

Some of them do not own land, and therefore have to rent houses. Having no income they are faced with the threat of eviction. Even those who own land have shelter that is so badly dilapidated that it cannot offer protection from the elements especially when bad weather comes.

Their low to nonexistent income negates their ability to access medical services and results in many of them having recurring bouts of illnesses which are actually quite easily curable. Many die due to lack of medications.

The situation is made worse by the fact that many of these “jaja’s” have grandchildren who look up to them for provision yet the jaja’s have no resources to provide for them.

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