October 2022 update

Hi friends it’s been a while since you last heard from us.

We have good news related to our empowerment program. During our previous update, we informed you that the following items are currently considered essential to promote education according to the local people:

• School uniforms. 
• School supplies such as notebooks, chalk, blackboards, markers, pens. 
• Backpacks. 
• Alphabet combination games to teach the children to read and write.

After several conversations and brainstorming sessions, we finally decided to purchase the school uniforms first and this for two reasons.

1. It is the biggest cost that parents have to bear themselves in order to send their children to school.
2. It is a way to support the local economy: we purchased two sewing machines and the necessary fabrics and employed two dressmakers to sew the school uniforms and we ensured that adults can have new clothes made or old ones repaired for a small fee.

Thanks to your support, we have been able to provide 250 children with school uniforms free of charge over the past 2 months (Youtube video is in the making) 

For our sewing workshop, we made a house out of wood in which all the uniforms are produced locally. This led us to reflect on whether it would not be better to make our first school also out of wood instead of bricks. Due to the extremely difficult terrain and limited resources, this would be more cost and time efficient.

Regarding the Brothers4Change products: from our powerbank satisfaction survey we learned that the charging cable of our powerbank could be longer and sturdier. We have been busy developing a new, sturdier and longer cable. All customers who bought a powerbank through the website will
receive a new cable early next month. If you bought our powerbank via Amazon or Bol.com, please send us a message (due to the fact that we cannot find the customer data on Bol.com and Amazon after a while) and we will also send you a new cable for free.

As always, we will keep you informed on the progress we are making together.

Thank you for your support whether you bought a product, shared a post, or just told a friend about us. We truly appreciate it.

P.S. In early June, our Instagram account was hacked Since then, we have done everything we can to get it back. However, Instagram does not even bother to reply to our messages. We therefore felt compelled to create a new account. You can follow our new account through the following link: https://www.instagram.com/brothers.4.change/