IPI is a dynamic and exciting organisation. Working for peace through education, entrepreneurial skills development, and women’s empowerment, it runs a wide array of programmes. The team is constantly on the go and there’s rarely a dull moment!
Your daily schedule will reflect your own goals and interests. You will be supervised at first, but IPI welcomes volunteers who can take the initiative and make a contribution based on their own skills and aptitudes.
IPI’s core programmes
Kithoka Amani Community Children’s Home (KACH): a child-centered, family focused, and community-based home to around 30 children. Some are orphans, some are living with or affected by HIV/AIDS, and some have been taken in because their parents are not able to look after them.
Skills Training: Ecologia is supporting IPI to create a network of skilled women, who are trained in organic agriculture, tailoring, weaving, jewellery-making & tie-dyeing, to model how vulnerable women can earn their own living to support their children. Recently, they ran a successful hairdressing training course for 33 commercial sex workers, to give them an alternative means of providing for themselves and their families.
Community Support: IPI builds community capacity to effectively respond to challenges of HIV/AIDS, poverty, and violence through empowerment workshops, community-led campaigns and advocacy, especially with women.
Tiriji eco-center
The Tiriji Eco-Centre: IPI produces almost all its own food and is developing a permaculture approach to sustainable living. At IPI’s new Tiriji Eco-Centre, the farm uses an Integrated Land Use Design (ILUD), combining traditional agricultural practices with permaculture principles. The centre is envisioned as an educational space, where local women and international guests can attend workshops to learn about ILUD and how they can incorporate it to make their lives more sustainable. Guest accommodation is being built from local building materials with eco features such as composting toilets, rainwater harvesting systems, and solar-powered electricity.
The Institute for Nonviolence and Peace (INPEACE): INPEACE hosts regular transformative conferences and awareness-raising trainings to highlight gains made by women fighting HIV/AIDS, poverty and violence at the grassroots level, reduce stigma and discrimination, and facilitate conflict resolution and peacebuilding.
What kind of work will I be doing?
The work you do will be varied and tailored to your interests. It could involve one or more of the following:
Skills trainings – making yoghurt to sell
- Living, working, playing with the children at KACH to enrich their lives; organising some after-school clubs and weekend activities for the children or helping in the kitchen.
- Assisting with women’s skills-training workshops, empowering them to support themselves and their families.
- Working on Tiriji’s organic farm studying permaculture, sustainable agriculture and renewable energy solutions; planting trees; helping to construct eco-buildings.
- Assisting with lessons at local schools; promoting nonviolence and peacebuilding in those schools and their communities; teaching English.
- Working with a women’s cooperative; developing small business enterprises with women and youth.
- Supporting women’s and children’s human rights advocacy efforts; promoting reproductive health care for women and girls.
- And much more!
Find out more about what to expect, who can volunteer, and how to apply here.
