WINDHOEK – Unemployment and poverty have become a daily song specifically in Windhoek, however Lidar Community Foundation is not just an ordinary charity organisation, it wants to change the fate of a lot of poverty-stricken people.
Lidar Community Foundation, situated in the central rural area of Windhoek, runs programmes to foster youth empowerment and education activities for orphaned and vulnerable girls in Katutura-Central.
Upon the arrival of New Era at the centre, Lidar foundation executive director Serlyn Khaxas was busy meeting a young girl from the dusty location of Katutura who was in need of sanitary pads, and she got assisted immediately, which shows that good Samaritans still exist in this age.
Speaking to New Era, Khaxas said: “Our foundation covers three different main areas of work in the community, mainly focusing on the empowerment of orphaned and vulnerable female children.”
“Currently the organisation officially supports more than hundred girls to go to school, and assists with homework, encourages a reading culture and provides food, counseling and other basic needs for families as well as runs different education, empowerment and skills programmes for the girl child in the community at the centre,” she added.
When asked how she copes in the absence of external donor funding, Khaxas responded: “My current work I am doing in my community is something very dear to my heart since my childhood years. I know how difficult it is to be a young mother and not have all the support you need to raise the baby. This is a destiny I was envisaged to reach.”
She said that before the foundation started vulnerable people from the community flocked to her house and she would always accommodate some students from the regions who are unable to get accommodation in Windhoek.
It is because of her kindness that it became her ‘responsibility’ to always assist them with the little that she had until she decided to come up with an organisation so that she can be fully responsible for needy people. Even though Khaxas has partly studied journalism and communication technology and worked in Germany for long, she said her heart belongs in her foundation and it’s the only work she is planning to do.
In an interview with New Era, Felicity Garises said she is one of the four orphan students who are Lidar foundation beneficiaries and have reached tertiary level education.
“Both my parents died when I was young and I look up to Ms Khaxas as my mother. She accommodated me in her house when I had no shelter, and when I passed my matric she put me through university and Lidar foundation is where I belong,” said Garises who is a first-year charted accounting student at the University of Namibia.
“The over-arching philosophy of the foundation is to assist the poorest of the poor in the community to end the generational cycle of poverty, especially the girl-child in accessing educational opportunities, provide a safe and conducive after-school environment for further studies and serve as a transformational centre, including supplementary feeding for the girls and young women, tutoring and provision of educational and extra-curricular programmes, vocational training for out of school girls and school drop-out teenagers, job-search and placement of graduates from this vocational training, to name a few of the benefits members of the centre enjoy,” said a Lidar foundation volunteer who was shy to mention her name.
But the road is not that easy for Lidar foundation because of the growing number of beneficiaries and some of the many challenges they face are lack of food to give women and babies a nutritious meal, lack of ingredients for the skills training sessions and lack of capital resources to send women to training to get employed.
Lidar foundation intends to be part of a greater campaign for change in the community and the country at large.
“We want to be a shaper of destiny for our fellow human beings especially the well-being of a girl child that is so dear to our society. We believe in the old-fashion African way of raising a child as it was a more successful way of doing it,” explained Khaxas.