International Charity for Africa
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International Charity for Africa (ICA) is a Canadian NGO and charitable organization delivering community level poverty alleviation support through small & micro enterprise economic development. ICA provides assistance in small-business coaching, skills training, product & services development, world-market development, efficient production tools and micro-lending, to promising entrepreneurs in sub-Saharan Africa so that they will grow their small businesses and in turn, create meaningful employment opportunities for men & women (parents) and young people in Africa, to help reduce poverty on the continent. ICA's approach is that when people earn fair wages, they are able to provide their families with fundamental needs - food, housing, clothing, health, and education.
ICA feels that the developed world has already spent over 50 years and several hundred billion dollars on trying to solve the problem of extreme poverty in Africa and yet very little has changed today. ICA believes that what the 80% of able-bodied unemployed (or underemployed) people in sub-Saharan Africa need are jobs, not handouts in, child sponsorships or food aid, etc. Like parents in the developed world, having reasonable jobs would make those of African children most certainly, able to take care of their children's needs and pay for necessary social/community needs like water, health-care, roads, etc.
The fact of the very large numbers of unemployed people and the potental huge sums of money and capacity required to create the necessary numbers of jobs, will indicate that the financially strapped African governments can not create all the required jobs needed by their people today. And even if some of them did, it could be conter-productive in the face of our prevalent free trade economies. Based on recent ICA's field studies, local entrepreneurs provide the logical answer. That is why ICA is focusing on assisting grassroots entrepreneurs to become the "engines" that will drive the national economies of sub-Sahara, to sustained development.(Ref:United Nations; Integrating Economic, Social and Environmental Policy, chap-2; National Development Strategies (page 12) http://www.un.org/esa/devagenda/UNDA1.pdf)
