Towards independence

Community For Better Life is a community-based organization in Dzaleka Refugee Camp, Malawi, founded by young refugee Gabriel Ndende Muholeza

Community for Better Life was established in the Dzaleka Refugee Camp in Malawi in 2019. We strive to enhance people’s lives by providing high-quality training that will enable them to develop skills-for-life that have the capacity to lift them out of poverty and towards financial stability, while tackling environmental matters in order to restore our natural environment. Community for Better Life is an organization dedicated to the well-being of marginalized communities within the refugee population and beyond.

We are not limited to responding to emergency cases in the communities in which we operate, but we are there when we are needed: for example, we previously responded to the Covid-19 pandemic by training people in our communities on ways to protect themselves and distributed preventive materials such as water buckets for washing hands, sanitizers, and masks.

We are focusing on women and youths; we are training women and youths from the refugee community and the Malawian host community on entrepreneurship, product manufacturing, and environmental conservation. Community for Better Life believes that sustainability is achieved when people are taught how to get what they want rather than being given what is assumed they need.

We are developing community members into productive members of the society who should be responsible for their own lives and who care about the lives of others. Community for Better Life believes that sustainability is also accomplished when people are active in decision making by providing them with opportunities to address their problems that influence their everyday lives, hence, we implement the related solutions to the problems that really matter to them.

Dzaleka Refugee Camp is home to more than 50,000 refugees from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, Somalia and other countries. Ninety percent of camp residents cannot find work, which results in a stressful situation that seriously impacts their mental health and leaves them with no hope for the future. Creating jobs is not enough – they also need to learn the skills that will get them hired or enable them to create their own businesses; in this case we train them in skills that will help them build their financial stability while protecting the environment.

The CFBL team firmly believes that sustainability is achieved when people are taught how to get what they want rather than being given what is assumed they need.

Community For Better Life (CFBL) Through our volunteers we have managed to build a forum of young people who are advocating for the climate justice in their communities through different innovations that aims at conserving the environment. In addition, we also provide them with green entrepreneurship skills that helps them find job opportunities and build a healthy environment.