ROM’s support for OVC yields at COWA: Patience and Bildard credit ROM for agribusiness skills

As a first-time visitor at Companionship of Works Association (COWA) Banda, you will be taken up by the astonishing beauty of the institution’s compound. Never will you miss to ask who is behind all this, so nice that it is hard to tell whether these amazing plants, are for food or decoration. Most of them are leafy vegetables of different species; onions, collard greens (commonly known as Sukuma Wiki) and many more. By the time you get to know that Patience Mirembe and Bildard Ekinu, a pair of 2022 final agribusiness students at COWA are behind this scientific art, you will be surprised at seeing the duo, so young, brilliant and entrepreneurial.
Reach Out Mbuya, under the Orphans and Vulnerable Children (OVC) program has been sponsoring the two at COWA, an institution that gives agribusiness, welding and hair and beauty skills to young people. Amidst their busy schedules, Patience and Bildard find time to tend to their plants, with a lot of passion as though caring to little humans. The duo also manages a green house in which they grow cucumber and green pepper.
ROM fosters purposeful careers for her OVC and on identifying careers of interest tries to enroll them where the desired trades can be learnt.

 

Patience tending to her plants

Having completed senior four, Patience could not afford tuition to continue with secondary education, until ROM gave her a chance to enroll at COWA. Hers is a unique but an inspiring story, of a girl who has passion in agribusiness, a male dominated career. She however attributes her success to ROM, which paid up all her fees at COWA to gain skills in the trade. Her dream is to continue with it so as to improve her life and also help others learn. She hopes to start up a farm on which she will be growing vegetables for sale. It will also act as a demonstration farmstead. She learnt poultry keeping as well, a skill she does with a lot of love. This is demonstrated in the chicken house, where she carries chicks with a lot of love and professionalism. Currently, Patience has enrolled for a National Diploma in Agriculture at COWA and is steadily progressing.

Bildard with his former Principal at the demonstration garden at Mukono during the follow up visit

As for Bildard, he is so thankful to ROM for giving him an opportunity to study agribusiness. “To me, this is a dream come true. I can never stop thanking Reach Out Mbuya for such love and help given to me.” He said in an interview with a Reach Out staff recently.  Like Patience, Bildard’s dream is to start a farm on which he can grow these crops for sale and also train other children like him.

ROM followed Bildard to find out how he is fairing in life after graduation at COWA, we got him at Mukono district local government headquarters where he was contracted by the Ministry of Agriculture to raise a cabbage and tomato demonstration garden.

Chrispine Wanyahoro, the Principle at COWA says that Reach Out Mbuya supports a number of students at the institution, and all of them complete when they can sustain themselves. When asked about Bildard and Patience, Chrispine, shouts all praises for the duo, who have lived an exemplary lifestyle at the institute. She adds that there is no doubt that these two will emerge successful agriculturalists in Uganda.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bildard and Patience caring for their plants at COWA

Share your comments below. Please read our commenting guidelines before posting. If you have a concern about a comment, report it here.

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Share Now

Supporting Grandmothers to Combat HIV in Luweero

Play Video

Share Now

Related News

Zero Mother-to-Child Infections

Zero Mother-to-Child Infections: Ambassador Popp applauds ROM for PMTCT excellence During the Stakeholders’ meeting, the Ambassador learnt that ROM has excelled in the Prevention of

Read More »
We use cookies to personalise content and ads, to provide social media features and to analyse our traffic. We also share information about your use of our site with our social media, advertising and analytics partners. View more
Cookies settings
Accept
Privacy & Cookie policy
Privacy & Cookies policy
Cookie name Active

Who we are

Our website address is: https://www.reachoutmbuya.org.

What personal data we collect and why we collect it

Comments

When visitors leave comments on the site we collect the data shown in the comments form, and also the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection. An anonymized string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it. The Gravatar service privacy policy is available here: https://automattic.com/privacy/. After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment.

Media

If you upload images to the website, you should avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included. Visitors to the website can download and extract any location data from images on the website.

Contact forms

Cookies

If you leave a comment on our site you may opt-in to saving your name, email address and website in cookies. These are for your convenience so that you do not have to fill in your details again when you leave another comment. These cookies will last for one year. If you visit our login page, we will set a temporary cookie to determine if your browser accepts cookies. This cookie contains no personal data and is discarded when you close your browser. When you log in, we will also set up several cookies to save your login information and your screen display choices. Login cookies last for two days, and screen options cookies last for a year. If you select "Remember Me", your login will persist for two weeks. If you log out of your account, the login cookies will be removed. If you edit or publish an article, an additional cookie will be saved in your browser. This cookie includes no personal data and simply indicates the post ID of the article you just edited. It expires after 1 day.

Embedded content from other websites

Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited the other website. These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracking your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.

Analytics

Who we share your data with

How long we retain your data

If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is so we can recognize and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue. For users that register on our website (if any), we also store the personal information they provide in their user profile. All users can see, edit, or delete their personal information at any time (except they cannot change their username). Website administrators can also see and edit that information.

What rights you have over your data

If you have an account on this site, or have left comments, you can request to receive an exported file of the personal data we hold about you, including any data you have provided to us. You can also request that we erase any personal data we hold about you. This does not include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes.

Where we send your data

Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service.

Your contact information

Additional information

How we protect your data

What data breach procedures we have in place

What third parties we receive data from

What automated decision making and/or profiling we do with user data

Industry regulatory disclosure requirements

Save settings
Cookies settings