Year End Appeal 2021

With support from Creating Hope in Conflict: a Humanitarian Grand Challenge, we have launched a project to transform the way families cook their meals in South Sudan. The project is led by Adong (above left) and Akuol (above right).
Adong and Akuol are supported by our project partners from EarthSpark International, who recently completed a similar project in Haiti.
Our team will soon deploy electric cooking devices to the village of Wanyjok in Aweil East County. This is where our other project partner, SunGate Solar, is installing the microgrid infrastructure to provide solar electricity to the village. Soon Wanyjok residents who join us as test customers will plug into the microgrid to cook their meals!

The benefits of clean cooking cannot be over-emphasized. In South Sudan, over 99% of households utilize traditional charcoal and woodfuels for cooking and the vast majority of cooking is done on indoor unvented cookstoves or over open flames. This results in high levels of household air pollution, which can lead to serious respiratory illness and death, especially for women and young children. Traditional cooking also perpetuates gender inequalities by placing extreme time and physical burden on women, diminishing quality of life and opportunities for education and income. These fuels can also lead to significant environmental impacts from land degradation and other factors over-stressing the region’s natural resources.
We are grateful for our grant, our partners, and our team enabling us to carry out this project. We look forward to providing regular updates over the coming months as we test this new way of cooking in South Sudan. Along the way, we will capture all the data we need to build a case for delivering electric cooking options to other parts of the Country and collaborate with other groups contributing to this urgent humanitarian and environmental need.

Other News and Needs

Clean cooking is not the only need in South Sudan. Far from it! We are also addressing the following:

• • Wunlang Primary School remains the strongest symbol for education, unity, and hope. Since the school was built, many students who finished primary school have gone on to secondary school. A few students are in universities. This is a huge achievement for the Wunlang community and other villages sending their children to Wunlang. VHSS has made history in Wunlang by supporting education. There is no way VHSS could boast such an impact without the support from our donors.

• • In 2020 a big storm destroyed the roof over part of Wunlang Primary School. Four classrooms and an office are now unusable. It has been a very difficult school year in Wunlang. Children are outside again without classrooms. During the rainy season it interferes with class timetables. The community in Wunlang is asking VHSS to help by putting back the roofs on the classrooms and fixing the doors.
    
    
  • Wunlang Secondary School: This year the school has a good number of students who have enrolled. There is one classroom of freshmen and one classroom of sophomores. Our hope is that when the school year starts in 2022, additional classrooms will be added. The community is asking for our help to build two more classrooms to accommodate the junior class this year.