Village Anvil was founded in 2005 on the initiative of Dr Jey Ngole, a Cameroonian living in the UK who wanted to do something to promote a better life for people in the villages of the Kupe-Muaneguba Division of Cameroon; the area where he was born and brought up. That was to be the beginning: he also saw that, in the longer run, the project might serve as a model for village development in other parts of Cameroon and elsewhere in Africa.
Village Anvil is a charity registered in the UK, with a board and a group of advisers that includes people with experience of management, finance and development, all of whom have direct experience of Cameroon. Our first project was to survey a group of villages in Kupe-Muaneguba, for which we received a grant from the Big Lottery Fund – International Small Grants Programme. The aim was to discover what the people in the villages saw as priority.
As a result of the survey, we now have a set of proposals for steps that can be taken to achieve our primary objective: improving the lives of the villagers. We have also established links with NGOs in Cameroon to help us implement the proposals: in particular, Nature Cameroon, the organisation commissioned to undertake interviews and photography for the 2007 survey.
We are now seeking support to enable us to carry the work forward, both as comprehensive village-scale project and as a smaller tasks within a village. Do contact us for detail of the programme.