Goodness Radiance, Aba Island, Sudan
Goodness Radiance is a volunteer-led women’s organization founded by Dr. Amel Aldehaib in May 2023 and based in Aba Island, White Nile Region, Sudan. The organization positively impacts the lives of many women and children, men, and people of diverse ages through actions such as:
- Responding to critical lifesaving needs of Internally Displaced People (IDPs);
- Building and maintaining community gardens to address food scarcity resulting from the civil war;
- Assisting in health care, including providing support to peopole with critical and chronic health conditions;
- Providing employment opportunities for women from host and displaced communities;
- Building/strengthening capacities of women and girls from host and displaced communities with different skills such as soap-making and the construction of clay cooking stoves to support self-sufficiency and income generation;
- Providing protection services, particularly to displaced women and girls;
- Creating safe spaces and life skills training for youth;
- Offering literacy classes for women from both host and displaced communities;
- Hosting public lectures on various topics such as child protection in displacement camps to counteract abuse of children within IDP camps;
- Providing dignity kits for girls and women (undergarments and menstrual care items);
- Facilitating collaboration with other grassroots organizations to address common challenges facing civil society on Aba Island, and beyond.
In the image below, approximately 90 women are learning to build clay cooking stoves (70 IDPs and 20 from the host community). Beside the environmental and economical value, it proved to be a successful income generating activity for many of these women, some of whom are now selling the stoves to sustain themselves and their families.
In the summer of 2024, these women trained in soap making using a manual mini factory to produce soap to sell. For soap making we trained around 60 women from both IDPs and host communities. We employed 15 of them to run the manual factory and produced for market. Around 20 are producing soap at home in small amounts to sell to neighbours to generate income. The rest are producing at home for their own consumption only for lack of enough funds to produce for market.
