SowHope

Meet Isaac & Sepiranza

Isaac and Sepiranza are tireless leaders in their community. Sepiranza, a trained midwife, exudes passion for maternal healthcare in rural Uganda, while Isaac focuses on his heart for literacy and microfinance training and development. For over 10 years of working with SowHope, this power couple has served over 4,000 women, with thousands more children and husbands benefiting. As passionate leaders, they truly embrace a holistic approach to women empowerment which they see as the best way to facilitate development in their community.

Seeing a need for a clean, safe place for women to give birth, they built a SowHope-funded maternity clinic from the ground up. This is the only clinic within hundreds of kilometres for 1,000 women who live in the area. To meet government regulations, they advocated for the education of local midwives who are now employed by the clinic.

To alleviate poverty, Isaac and Sepiranza applied to SowHope to begin a sustainable microfinance group among the women, training and education. Through small loans with low-interest, hundreds of women have been able to cultivate self-sustaining animal husbandry, knitting, and other small enterprises.

With these new businesses came the need for understanding how to buy and sell in the market. One barrier for these women, along with other women in the community, was a low literacy rate. Isaac and Sepiranza developed a curriculum that would allow the women to read and write at an 8th grade level. An achievement that many of the women who have participated call “life-changing”.

They continue to dream up new ways to facilitate development in the surrounding communities and are planning for bigger things in the future.