David Clemy, VICOBA Plus and Kitega Centre
Uganda 🇺🇬 based, serving regionally and globally
Meet David
David Clemy is creator and founder of VICBOA Plus and Director (serving as a devoted volunteer) of the Kitega Centre. Kitega is a community hub designed to help children with disabilities and their families flourish. The Centre is based in a small town and serves the surrounding rural area.
As a motivating leader and innovator, David piloted a unique form of Village Community Resource Banking (VICOBA Plus) at the Kitega Centre in 2010. Initially used as a tool to empower widowed women and families of children with disabilities in the rural Ugandan community of Kitega, it has proven to be a transformative process for communities across East Africa. Under David’s leadership, and with his creation and growth of the VICOBA Plus model, the Kitega Centre, with VICOBA Plus as its engine, now empowers hundreds of families and has become a regional hub for community development.
David began with the idea of helping people by encouraging them to come together and think “outside the box”. He began by challenging participants to focus on what they had rather than focus on what they lacked. VICOBA Plus provides a combination of inspiration to dream big, imaginative small business training, creation of strong community, transformational mindset change, and skills to start group savings and generate capital. Through expansion across East Africa, VICOBA Plus is helping communities and individuals shift their perspective, leverage what is around them, and cultivate real change in their lives.
About VICOBA Plus
Essential elements of VICOBA Plus include life skills training, community savings groups formation, resource mobilization, and critically, a mental shift towards self-sustainability. While VICOBA Plus at first glance may appear to be a traditional community banking program, the method first, and most importantly, focuses on mindset shift and building strong community cohesion and trust. This approach solidifies collaboration and strong community loyalty before initiating any savings, sharing, and start up plans are made. VICOBA Plus members start to ask “what do we have around us and how can we use it?” These questions inform the creation of income-producing business ventures and social enterprises that bring enduring change to VICOBA Plus communities, many of which are in contexts living below the poverty line.
VICOBA Plus groups build strong community cohesion that helps individuals and communities weather unexpected disruptions. VICOBA Plus encourages communities to adopt a long-range vision of their futures, ensuring collaboration, group savings, and community goals are for the long haul.
Communities equipped with VICOBA Plus training are flourishing throughout East Africa, including in Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, and the DRC. Creative thinking, economic empowerment, innovative businesses, and social impact initiatives flow out from VICOBA Plus groups, and bring benefit to people in the broader community.
Opportunities to Invest in Community Development
You can partner with David and advance VICOBA Plus to continue expanding and deepening the work of resource mobilization and community empowerment. This movement and work is led and held by remarkable facilitators who originate from the communities they are serving across East Africa by:
- Organizational Strengthening: Support operational funding for the VICOBA Plus team. Dependable funding allows the VICOBA Plus lead team to continue to develop and codify their model and advance healthy replication, training, and expansion.
- Expansion: Sponsor a first time training series in a new VICOBA Plus community. This support will lay the foundation for the formation of a new hub or expand the reach of an existing hub. One training series catalyzes impact for years to come, as groups are equipped to generate savings and launch businesses. This support uplifts and empowers a whole community.
- Acceleration Fund: Provide a funding pool for matching funds project grants. This fund serves established groups who have demonstrated their long term commitment to saving and collaborating. These funds take these groups and their businesses to the next level.
- Impact Evaluation and Data Collection: VICOBA Plus is demonstrating agility and the potential for replication in a wide variety of contexts. Documenting and reporting the impact of the VICOBA Plus project will provide a vehicle for expanding its application globally.