I DARED TO BE A SOLUTION TO THE PROBLEM I ENCOUNTERED

 

Arinze Okwara is my name. I experienced abject poverty during childhood. My dad was a government school teacher with two wives and a total of fifteen children. His earning was too small to afford the cost of basic needs for the entire family.  When I was 12 years old, I started pushing wheel barrow in the market place to earn money to support the feeding need of my family. The situation propelled me into doing that. While in secondary school I engage in myriad menial jobs to buy text books and support my school needs. I was among the best in my class during my secondary school but among the poorest in the class. I grew up hating poverty with passion. Education has changed the story my family today. My sibling and I paid rapt attention to education. That helped us to surmount the pang of the social malady called poverty. That made me have a strong believes that balanced education is the cure for poverty.

Some years back I attended a seminar organized by Dr Sunny Obazu Ojeagbase’s Success Attitude Development Centre on “How to start an NGO” because I was nursing a dream of establishing an NGO that will fight poverty by providing  scholarship opportunity for children from poor families. That seminar motivated me to set up MISSIONARY ORGANIZATION FOR CHILD EDUCATION AND TRAINING (MOCET) designed with the mission of poverty alleviation through promotion of balanced education. The NGO is pioneering the initiative tagged: FEED EDUCATE POOR CHILD PROJECT. We are bringing people who have natural affinity for helping the needy together as MOCET-VOLUNTEERS. We have a target of building up to one million MOCET-VOLUNTEERS. We are making donations to set up a social business that will generate more fund for our charity project. We have established MOCET BRAVEMOTHERS CREDIT UNION a nongovernmental micro finance cooperative society that will render savings and loans services and channel the profit generated to charity. The social business will have special project that support mothers with micro loan facility for Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) operation with a very low interest rate. This project is a family support programmme. The idea is to support families through mothers so that they can give better support to their children. MOCET equally organizes seminars for parents on child education and training. We support orphanage homes catering for motherless and abandoned children. We support children from indigent homes with educational sponsorship knowing that balanced education help them overcome poverty.