Urban poor communities are confronted with recurrent challenges that undermine their livelihoods and socio-economic survival. This reality necessitates the need and desire for FEDURP to galvanise itself to maximise potential and opportunities to optimize livelihoods of its members and settlements. This is underpinned by the federation’s dream of progressive change “from poverty to prosperity” and will be pursued through the following strategies:
Priority 1: Daily savings – to strengthen the daily savings through new innovative practices to increase our membership and improve on our collection procedures. This is to maximise our local financial base at group levels which may serve as hands-on access to micro-finance that would address our basic household needs.
Priority 2: Fordibambai Trust (local Urban Poor Fund – UPF) – This is a collective funding basket in which every federation member is expected to contribute to on a monthly basis. We will adopt new creative ways to optimize the potential of this fund. Given the growing competitiveness to attract donor funding and the lack or limited access to government funding, this basket is intended to build a local financial base to support our operations and initiatives. The Fund also serves to leverage funding from other stakeholders, such as matching funds or local contribution to leverage donor funding opportunities or pursue partnership with micro-finance institutions to bankroll community entrepreneurial initiatives and micro-businesses
Priority 3: Entrepreneurship – We will continue to grow and expand our entrepreneurship initiatives which primarily capitalise on our community-based economic potentials such as production of whitewash from oyster shells; urban agriculture; fish preservation and plastic recycling, locally financed by our soft revolving micro loans. This also includes commercializing social services such as community water points and latrines and garbage collection funded through our actions and efforts. These are all intended to enhance the employability and livelihoods especially among women and young people. We will promote and establish relationship between urban marketers and rural growers to improve production and marketing as a means to enhancing livelihood.