Five Talents ~ Jamie Jameson

Can I just start off by saying thank you for listening so well and patiently last Sunday…and secondly, to ask you again to listen to or to read my boss Rachel’s talk from the St Luke’s service on June on the St Luke’s website (Sundays/Catchup)

She really covers things so well, and we at Five Talents want St Luke’s to know who they are partnering with, what is happening and how the gifts will be used.

Further to what both she and I have said, I’d like to share some very recent statistics that we find tremendously encouraging. We use stats a lot to discover how things are working…and twenty five years since we started has given us a terrific base for development, as noted by the UN.

We have projects in ten countries, last year over 60,000 clients…but I mentioned South Sudan on Sunday, the youngest country in the world, which since independence in 2011, after decades of bloody war, and civil war in 2013 and 2016, has been described as the world’s fastest growing refugee crisis.

Five Talents started working in Wandi, in South Sudan, over two years ago, and we recently received impact data that needs sharing! Wandi was part of the escape route for anti-government forces during both outbreaks of conflict. Homes were seized, harvests stolen, and gender-based violence against women was widespread and systematic. Nearly 5,000 people in the area are formally displaced. There is one bank in the entire region, no school at all in one of Wandi's five districts, and roads that are impassable for much of the year. When Five Talents first began working with partners there, the team would travel an hour by motorbike just to reach a mobile signal - a small detail that says something significant about how isolated and underserved this community is. In 2024, we partnered with Mothers' Union South Sudan to begin literacy groups in Wandi.

Those literacy groups became savings groups in 2025, and the data we have just received covers two years of work. It's incredible.

76% of members can now read in their mother tongue — up from just 4%.

Every single member has joined a savings group, 65% have taken a loan, and repayment rates stand at 99%.

71% have started a new business or income-generating activity.

66% say their household income has increased, and 60% say they can now send their children to school.

In 2024, only 18% of members said they knew anything about women's rights. By 2026, 93% are actively advocating for them.

And perhaps the most remarkable finding of all: at baseline, 38% of members reported having experienced trauma. By 2026, that figure was 98% — not because things had worsened, but because the trauma healing work had created, for many people, the first safe space they had ever had to name what happened to them. Those with coping strategies rose from 19% to 76%. Reports of improved family relationships reached 91%. Reports of active involvement in community peacebuilding reached 98%.

(Remember what we said about Shalom…can you see it?)

Are you still with me…I hope so. Please, please absorb those figures. That’s the change in two years. And most amazing of all, this programme is being delivered by two amazing women, Eunice and Catherine — who travel by motorbike on roads that regularly defeat larger vehicles, and sometimes continue on foot. Last year, while Eunice was attending a workshop in Nairobi, she received news that communities back home had been told to take shelter overnight in a school or church. When they returned to their homes, they had been looted. Some of those communities, during that enforced night away, had used the time to practice their literacy together.

Before this partnership began, the Mothers' Union trainers were asked to complete a security assessment. Their response was that insecurity had never stopped the Church or the Mothers' Union from carrying out their work — and that it was, if anything, a source of motivation.

There is a version of development work that brings external capital, external expertise, and a fixed timeline. It often leaves communities more dependent than it found them. What is happening in Wandi is something else entirely: built from within, owned by the people inside it, and still going.

We are so proud of Eunice and Catherine…and of all our trainers and facilitators, and their Five Talents trainers in the ten countries in which we partner with the local church. And speaking as a member of St Luke’s, how cool that we can be supporters of these amazing people!