The Rwanda Radio Project For Orphans is our oldest and largest program and has benefited tens of thousands of children. Along with our partner CARE International, we help support children in the north and south provinces of Rwanda, and have received encouraging feedback. One 18-year-old girl said that after receiving her Lifeline radio, she was informed about a sponsorship program for school fees and has now secured funding to finish school.

With your tremendous support, Lifeline Energy is now expanding its Rwanda program in collaboration with CARE’s Early Childhood Development initiative.

According to recent figures, only 13 per cent of Rwandese children from 3-6 have access to pre-primary school. With our Lifeline radios, the children unable to attend school will have access to education and give them the social skills to facilitate their future. Research has shown that early-childhood development programs make children more eager to finish schooling and make children more responsible.

Targeting the most vulnerable, the radios will be distributed to children in the Kamonyi and Musanze districts that live with the elderly or chronically ill, the marginalized, female-headed households and the destitute. Our partnership with CARE International – who has been active in Rwanda since 1984 - will go live later this year.

The Lifeline radio provides on-demand information broadcast from local and international sources, thereby improving the quality of life and providing social support. Since it was first introduced in Rwanda, the radio has given children access to information on life skills, disease-prevention, child-care, HIV/AIDS, news, animal husbandry, among others.

FREEPLAY FOUNDATION IS NOW KNOWN AS LIFELINE ENERGY:

We are delighted to announce that from April our new name is Lifeline Energy.

Operating as Freeplay Foundation has served us well for the past 11 years, however, we feel that our new name better reflects our wider mission to tackle energy poverty head-on for the poorest and most vulnerable.

In addition to including Lifeline radios and Lifelights in projects and programs, in the near future Lifeline Energy will launch a brand new, revolutionary communications tool that we believe will have a profound impact on education and information access in the developing world. We will send you more news about this soon.

Lifeline Energy remains a 501 (c)(3) registered charity in the USA, a registered charity in the UK and is a Section 18A and 21 non-profit in South Africa. Please visit our redesigned website and learn more about Lifeline Energy; www.lifelineenergy.org. All email addresses that were formerly @freeplayfoundation.org will now be @lifelineenergy.org.