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Measles in Samoa

Globally there has been a fierce outbreak of measles this year. Parts of Africa have been badly hit. We saw it ourselves in New Zealand with a surge in cases earlier in the year. However in recent weeks the news from Samoa has been devastating. By early December over 50 children have died from the measles epidemic.Banzaid does not have any active programme in Samoa. We do have contact through the Nu’u Fou Baptist Church in Apia. They ask us to be praying for the people of Samoa through this ti...

A Sigh of Relief?

By the middle of last week the warnings were going out: A major cyclone is heading up the Bay of Bengal. Cyclone Fani (pronounced “Foni”) was classified as a “very severe cyclonic storm”, and was going to hit first the coastal areas of Odisha State (the Indian State to the south west of West Bengal), and travel up through Kolkata to hit Bangladesh.The Bay of Bengal regularly experiences cyclones, and some of them have been very serious. The top of the Bay of Bengal is an area with a high...

PNG Cash Crop Project - Final Report

In 2013, Banzaid commenced the Papua New Guinea Cash Crop Development Project. The project’s long term goal was improved sustainability for the agricultural production of the coffee growers of the Baiyer Valley. Recently we submitted the final report to the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and Trade (MFAT) on their part in the funding of the project. This report summarises what happened, and the issues faced by the project.  ...

Sabbatical Report - Paul Redmond

As a teacher of Economics and Business Studies, I have been interested in the changing models of business and their impact on the communities in which they operate. While it is acknowledged that for many people in business, profit remains a primary motivator and focus, increasingly we are seeing people from a range of backgrounds viewing business as a vehicle for achieving a myriad of aims including environmental and social. Often there are synergies with these aims since there are shared values...

Cash Crop Project aims

The Cash Crop Development project in Papua New Guinea was established to help the coffee growers of the Baiyer Valley region of the Western Highland to get a better return for their coffee, and to help them diversify their sources of cash income. They are subsistence farmers, well able to feed their families and their villages, but they rely on the income from coffee for the cash to pay for things like children’s education, medical care, and to be able to buy the assets that make modern life m...

Murshidabad: Anti-Trafficking study

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Satitoa School Village Project

Tuesday 29 September 2009 a magnitude 8 earthquake struck off the south coast of Samoa just before 7 in the morning. The following tsunami was so close that there was little chance of any warning. The damage was extensive, with whole villages in the south eastern corner of Upolu Island wiped out. 143 people died. The stories of the survivors are both harrowing and amazing, and the miracle was more people didn’t die.Satitoa, on the southeast corner of the island of Upolu, was one of the worst h...

Solar for Bangladesh

In Bangladesh 53% of the population are still not connected to the national grid and receive no electricity. The majority of those not connected are rural families and poor families who can't afford the connection and currently use kerosene or candles for lighting. Clearly one answer for the problem lies in solar energy. However when Banzaid began looking at this issue in 2011, existing solar power systems available in Bangladesh were all too expensive for poorer people to afford.Starting in 201...

Annual Report 2013

As you read through this annual report we really do hope that you are encouraged by the work Banzaid is doing. Banzaid exists to restore life and to transform communities – although there are always challenges and obstacles to overcome, I believe we are fulfilling this mission. REAL people are having their lives transformed through these projects – real people, not statistics or faceless numbers – and this is surely cause for celebration!...

Community Development in Bangladesh

INTRODUCTIONThe Chandpur Total Community Development Centres (TCDC) project commenced in 2008 based from the town of Chandpur in Bangladesh. It was a broad programme for village development, built around village savings groups for the poorest families of the village, and included preschool facilities and a tutorial programme for their children. New Zealand Aid Programme funding for the project finished in 2015, and so the programme has been downsized to focus primarily on continued support for c...