By Moma Sandrine
On Saturday February 16th, some non-governmental organizations received donations in cash and in kind from The Fomunyoh Foundation, TFF.
The gesture that was done by Dr Christopher Fomunyoh, founder of TFF is in a bid to mitigating the consequences of the ongoing crisis in the North West Region. According to him, churches and some civil society organizations have been giving helping hands to displaced persons and as such need to be appreciated “we thought it will be worthwhile to give a boost of appreciation to the churches because they are doing a lot to support internally displaced persons. We also wanted to recognize a number of civil society organizations, youth groups and women centers that are doing their out most best under the most challenging of circumstances”.
In total, four churches and four civil society organizations benefitted from Fomunyoh’s donations. To him, these establishments have been very active within this crisis period “we looked at NGO’s that have been most active, and some that are targeting the most vulnerable. We know the youths are the most exposed under the current crisis and we thought supporting a youth group will send a strong message that we can entrust in them to help us out of the current crisis”.
One of the NGO’s that received the grants was YOP, Youth Outreach Program an organisation that works mainly with youths and has reached out to thousands of young people since its creation. During this sociopolitical unrest in the region, YOP has been giving assistance to IDP’s while training some of them on skills acquisition.
Melvin Songwe, the national president of one of the organizations that benefitted from the humanitarian assistance (United Youths Organization) expressed his satisfaction with the assistance given them “this gesture will go a very long way because it is so timely. In our organization, we have been struggling to raise funds locally to assist the very vulnerable internally displaced persons”.
Since the start of the Anglophone crisis, thousands of people have been displaced in the North West Region. In most cases, they seek assistance from civil society organizations or NGO’s. In other cases, these displaced persons can barely find shelter or food to eat. Their everyday prayer therefore is not to always receive aids but to have a lasting solution to the crisis so that they can return to their normal lives.
Dr Christopher Fomunyoh, founder of TFF is equally Senior Associate for Africa and Regional Director at the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs.