Your donations to Shaping Portsmouth’s Digital Enablement Programme, led by Hasmukh S “Husky” Patel, have reached as far as Sierra Leone through our Business Director, Mark Pembleton.
Alan Jenkins and his brilliant team at Enable Ability, based at Landport Community Centre, worked on a very tight deadline to prepare second hand devices donated by our generous community.
Mark Pembleton, who works for Portsmouth Council City as Economic Growth Manager and is a Director at Shaping Portsmouth, worked in Sierra Leone from 1984 to 1989 as a teacher and then as an aid worker. He is passionate about helping young people develop themselves in Sierra Leone.
He and his wife Mariatu, who is Sierra Leonian, try to bring much needed support to the country and in particular Kambia, a small rural town in the north of Sierra Leone. Mark and Mariatu were fortunate to be able to visit for three weeks at the end of October and beginning of November last year.
Through real dedication against the odds of difficult family backgrounds and terrible poverty, three young people, Bridget Kamara, Regina Bangura, and Sam Wilhelm, now study through a nursing programmes and go to university in Sierra Leone.
They desperately needed laptops for their work but their institutions do not provide them and they cannot afford them. By presenting them with these laptops we are making a huge contribution to their being able to qualify and work in hospitals and other areas to help boost the agriculture sector in the country and help feed the nation.
