VISION NGO aims to enable the improvement of the socio-economic conditions of disadvantaged and vulnerable people, mainly women, young people, and children, through projects that deliver direct assistance and programs raising professional know-how, empowering people for the labor market.
People need an opportunity and access to adequate opportunities for their needs, to show what they can do. By allowing someone to get developed, you have prepared a sustainable person, strengthened a family, and at the same time reduced many socio-economic problems which turn to costs for all of us.
Vision NGO has created opportunities for young people to start and develop entrepreneurship initiatives based on local resources as a direct contribution to their personal and professional empowerment, impacting society at the same time.
For the improvement of the quality of life for children, they are focused on education, delivering support, and creating partnerships with the schools in different disadvantaged rural areas of Albania.
What was the challenge?
Recognition of the problems encouraged the finding and development of opportunities. There are still a lot of social and economic problems all over Albania, and people struggling for a chance to start a better life.
Providing food aid assistance creates a disconnection in sustainability. Emphasizing that food aid assistance remains an immediate form of assistance for unforeseen cases or for cases of extreme poverty, where lack of food inhibits any other form of development.
But beyond this, the mechanism of getting out of poverty is empowerment with professional knowledge toward market needs, employment opportunities.
Sustainable development starts through education and this is the reason to focus our contribution in education in general, as well as in vocational training and on Job Learning, as a direct opportunity for employment and self-employment for youth and women in particular.
Vizion NGO consists of central staff and local co-workers as a way to coordinate work from the base to the center and vice versa.
What is the solution?
One of the programs they have started 4 years ago is the program HOPLA- hope and love, clothes with a conscience, through which they have set up 4 groups of women artisans, 17 women, in different areas of Albania. Hopla is a social enterprise that focuses on reusing clothes and giving them life again. The groups were set up step by step, focusing initially on artisans who had experience and were seeking a job, and then including other groups to increase their knowledge and then involving them in the production.
A very important program for the development of entrepreneurial initiatives based on local resources is RINIS – Regional initiatives of North Albania Innovative Start-Ups. From 50 applicants, it brought together 12 candidates, who wanted to start or had just started their businesses. During an eight-week intensive program based on study visits, best practices, training, workshops, and network building, the candidates developed their initiatives, and three of them were the winners of the support grant.