Providing Omilling, a remote mountain village, with a community grinding mill will give villagers a more stable food supply, reducing hunger. It also will free up women’s time, enabling them to pursue new opportunities and create a better life for their families and community.
Thanks to our generous donors, this project is fully funded!
The Challenge
One of the foods people in South Sudan eat almost every day is a porridge type dish made out of ground maize. Before it can be made, maize kernels have to be cut off cobs and then ground into a smooth powder. In Omilling, women do all this work by hand. For the grinding, they must squat on their knees for hours, hurting their back and joints. This laborious work takes several months to complete after each maize harvest. Sometimes, families go hungry when women’s other responsibilities prevent them from keeping up with production.
Our Response
Our Omilling Grinding Mill Project will buy a grinding mill machine to serve about 7,000 women. The machine will grind 1,000 kilograms of maize flour an hour! A mill manager will run the community grinding mill as a business, charging each woman $1 per month. The fee will cover fuel and maintenance and the manager’s work collecting maize, grinding maize flour, and returning the maize flour to its owner.
Potential Long-Term Impact
Providing villagers with a more stable food supply will reduce hunger. Eliminating one of women’s most time-consuming domestic chores will leave them more time to earn a living, grow food to feed their families, and create far-reaching social and economic changes in their community.
