Community Empowerment
Mercy Ships focuses on serving the forgotten poor - those who have been marginalised or rejected by society and lack the resources to improve their lives. Our programs are designed to empower and facilitate their journey toward increased well-being.
Rehabilitation
Mercy Ships assists the disabled and displaced in restoring functional environments for work and life. Through holistic personal and community development, Mercy Ships works to support the disabled in their everyday lives as they struggle to meet the basic human needs of food and shelter, and addresses deeper issues of personal development in character and maturity as they relate to the communities they live in and the national recovery process.
Mercy Ships operates a permanent land-based rehabilitation centre in Sierra Leone, conducting personal and community development programs for the disabled poor in Freetown and the surrounding areas. Programs integrate physical, spiritual, educational and economic rehabilitation together with primary health care, education and counselling.
Reintegration
Mercy Ships assists the disabled, helping them return home or, when there is no home, to establish themselves in new environments. Counselling and skills training is critical.
Small Business
Mercy Ships helps disabled and displaced persons to reach a place of self-reliance through economic empowerment. This involves skills training and financial training for micro enterprise development. Beneficiaries carry out small-scale businesses such as tailoring, shoemaking, blacksmithing, carpentry, weaving and agricultural enterprises.
For change to be sustainable, it must be grounded in a change in community thinking. As an extension of our medical health care work, Mercy Ships conducts development activities that encourage good health and improved quality of life in whole communities.
Community Health Education
Lack of knowledge about basic health care leads to tens of thousands of deaths each day in the developing world. Mercy Ships is committed to breaking the cycle of disease through prevention and knowledge. Community health education teams train students in basic health and hygiene, first aid and HIV/AIDS prevention, and community advocacy. These students then go on to teach others.
Clean Water & Sanitation
Mercy Ships helps to alleviate drinking water problems by providing training and assistance to local communities for digging new wells, and repairing existing water systems. Trainees receive basic education in how to maintain and take care of the wells and pumps.
Development teams work with villagers to build latrines, a basic component of a healthy community, and teach them about waterborne diseases and sanitation options. Mercy Ships seeks to establish a core group of people in each location who are able to teach and motivate others in creating and maintaining a healthy environment.
Agriculture
Agricultural programs help families and communities learn practical food-producing skills, thereby directly reducing malnutrition. Improved crops and income bring better health to the farmer, his family and his community. Teams address agricultural topics such as crop and garden planning, seed sowing and saving, natural disease and pest controls, and water conservation and irrigation practices.
These principles are foundational for sustainable community development.
Construction
In communities lacking resources and destroyed by disaster, Mercy Ships helps turn vision into reality. Together with local leaders, development teams assess community needs and then provide skills training, planning, assistance, and materials for a variety of building projects. Projects include building schools, clinics, orphanages and other public facilities.
During the construction, teams train local community members in useful building skills. The fact that residents are actively involved in Mercy Ships projects gives the local community a stronger sense of ownership.
Skills Training
For the poor or disabled in developing nations, the opportunity to learn a trade or skill offers a way out of poverty. Mercy Ships invests in individuals through on-the-job training, classroom teaching and capacity building, empowering people to improve their futures.
Women's Projects
In many developing countries, women in villages spend their lives fetching water and working in the fields, with little or no education. Mercy Ships empowers women in rural areas to embrace the possibility of transformation and to recognise their undeniably important role in society, mobilising them to find solutions to improve the quality of life for their families and communities through trade and commerce as well as emotional and spiritual development.
Mercy Ships works strategically to empower local leaders and establish community centers through training, support and motivation, mobilising them to initiate a compassionate, sustainable response to needs within their own communities.
HIV/AIDS Intervention
Alongside Mercy Ships community health education efforts, this program is designed to establish a sustainable response to the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Strategic emphasis is directed toward the empowerment of the faith community and schoolteachers in creating an effective response to the pandemic with a goal of increasing the number of HIV/AIDS care, support and prevention programs.
Leadership Training
Mercy Ships emphasises partnership with local leaders, teachers and churches to bring about lasting societal change. Conferences and workshops cover issues like HIV/AIDS, micro-finance, and community cooperation.
Often through self-initiated projects, volunteer crew and staff on ships and land give of their extra time and their own resources to meet needs of the poor and disadvantaged people.
In a dedicated effort to improve health care services for the long term in developing nations, Mercy Ships supports the practical support and training of local health care providers.
Medical Tools & Resources
Health care workers in the developing world often lack resources such as medicines, equipment and specific tools necessary to deliver basic medical care. In addition to providing training and support, Mercy Ships helps meet these practical challenges through the distribution of appropriate medical equipment and resources.
Medical Training & Mentoring
Mercy Ships builds local capacity through the training of national surgeons and nurses in new techniques and procedures appropriate for their environments. Local health care workers include medical specialists and generalists, dentists, ophthalmologists, surgeons, doctors, nurses, midwives and traditional birth attendants, community health workers and medical students.
Take a look at Mercy Ships Surgeries & Health Care programs.