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CULINKE |
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CULINKE - What’s in a name?..... CULINKE is the short name of Rural-Kenya World Cultural Link and translates into Cultural Link-Kenya. CULINKE’s tag line is “Humanity United Against Poverty” which gives the organisation it’s web name – www.HumanityUnitedAgainstPoverty.org. CULINKE addresses the most compelling of human desires—a world free of poverty and free of the misery that poverty breeds. CULINKE was founded in December 2001 by Kisumu Town youths as a small community-based youth-led platform to use cultural theatre approaches to create awareness on the devastation caused by HIV and AIDS and to promote behaviour change amongst the youth in regard to HIV/AIDS.
With time CULINKE broadened her approach to fighting HIV and AIDS to include fighting poverty as a driver of HIV and AIDS. In the Kenyan rural areas poverty and disease are part of culture as is dependency syndrome. Since culture is a total way of life CULINKE is influencing the cultural mind frame to change the belief that poverty is part of culture in the rural areas. The "culture of poverty" is a perpetuation, at society's lowest levels, of the patterns of life that form, over generations and sometimes centuries, a kind of prison. "It is much more difficult to eliminate the culture of poverty than to eliminate poverty per se." CULINKE is helping people escape poverty. People in the culture of poverty have a strong feeling of marginality, of helplessness, of dependency, of not belonging. |
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Poverty..What is it? |
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Poverty is malnourishment. Poverty is homelessness. Poverty is inability to access medical care. Poverty is lack of an informed mind, lack of basic general knowledge and basic literacy skills. Poverty is lack of savings and inaccessibility to credit…living from hand to mouth by the day …merely existing, scraping through life, groping for a meaningful co-existence with others, including nature. Poverty is death of a child from preventable diseases, and of an adult from treatable sicknesses. |
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HIV and AIDS |
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Poverty and social inequalities are leading co-factors in HIV transmission while at the same time HIV and AIDS induces and deepens poverty. Of great concern to CULINKE therefore is the effect of HIV and AIDS on the productive life of the people. The scourge has emerged as a cause of poverty and is officially recognised as a threat to development in Kenya. This is the reason CULINKE has put it at the core of her poverty reduction agenda. |
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