The plight of widows in Nigeria is pathetic and could be compared to that of second-class citizens. Many women who did not complete 6th grade of school will marry to ease their parent’s financial burden. For lack of proper education and productive skills, they may end up doing petty trading in the village market to support their children.

As soon as their husband dies, hardship and poverty sets in for these women. The petty trading they were doing cannot sustain them and their children. Customarily, these women, now widows, do not remarry.

Some of these widows are forced into prostitution to receive financial help thereby compounding their problems and poverty.

For lack of finances, many of these widow’s children drop out of school, join gangs and start committing wicked deeds in the villages. Many of these children end up in prison. The widows will often enter churches just to get hand-outs. Many of the churches are poor and cannot meet the needs of these widows.

On one of the mission trips in Nigeria, Evangelist Patience Okafor and Evangelist Wilson Okafor began counseling some widows that came to the evangelistic meeting. They witnessed the needs of these widows and discovered that their needs could not be met by giving them hand-outs in the form of dry food, cash, etc. Evangelist Patience and Wilson concluded that these widows need to be empowered.

In 2013, Evangelist Patience and Wilson interviewed widows who are believers and gave these widows some money to add to their businesses as micro-financing. Some pastors and their wives were engaged to supervise these widows and have monthly meetings with them. In 2014, Evangelist Patience and Wilson discovered that some widows do not have businesses and were in need of training in business skills. Two business skills became the focus of this training effort: seamstress and poultry.

To begin a seamstress business, each widow will need a foot-pedal style of sewing machine, a Singer. The cost of each sewing machine is about $300 plus the cost of the accessories. Evangelist Patience and Wilson would like to start this training effort with 50 of these sewing machines, so a total cost of $15,000.

In the poultry business, each widow will need a chicken barn (10 feet by 15 feet) built in her husband’s compound. She will be provided with 200 broiler chickens and two bags of chicken feed. The start-off cost for each widow will be about $500. Evangelist Patience and Wilson would like to start this training effort with 20 widows, so a total cost of $10,000.