Zambia

Children in Distress (CINDI)

CINDI‘s overall goal is assist orphans and vulnerable children affected by HIV through holistic interventions that influence policy and practice at the national and local levels. The organization works with a network of over 700 volunteers in 12 local neighbourhoods. The volunteers identify and register orphans, assess their needs, and together with local authorities, encourage community members to look after the children so that they can grow up as normally as possible. The volunteers quickly realized that grandmothers carry the lion’s share of family support to orphans — especially for those who have lost both parents — and that most of these grandmothers need training, peer-support and some supplemental assistance in order to sustain their care.

With SLF support, CINDI reaches out to grandmother-caregivers via the creation of granny-networks that provide peer support and training and act as conduits for direct assistance to households in greatest need. This assistance takes the form of educational support for orphans in primary school, emergency food supplements and start-up capital for grandmother networks that are involved in income-generating activities. CINDI’S training focuses on basic business, savings and entrepreneurship skills, with added emphasis on HIV and sexual reproductive health.

Children with a Future in Zambia (CFZ)

A good education is key to any child’s future, and it all depends on learning the basics in primary school. To that end, Children with a Future in Zambia (CFZ) runs five community schools in the Kitwe, Lumwana and Nakonde Districts of Zambia, which cater to approximately 1,200 children annually. Without these schools, the children — all of whom are orphaned, very poor and vulnerable — would likely grow up to be functionally illiterate and incapable of obtaining any future education or employment. 

Children with a Future in Zambia also aims to improve the economic well-being of women-headed households. It partners with the SLF to assist grandmothers who care for orphaned and vulnerable children. The organization provides material support (including a sleeping mat and household supplies), skills-training and income generating activities. Beneficiaries are identified through home visits, community meetings with local support groups, via church leaders, and through consultations with local government representatives. All participating grandmothers are encouraged to start small savings-and-loan clubs, which the SLF supports through training and start-up funds. Two groups that have already established income-generating activities are provided with follow-up support. Finally, the grandmothers receive training in HIV/AIDS and in psychosocial counselling. With this knowledge, they are expected to help the children in their own care, as well as other elder-headed families in the community.

Community Based TB/HIV/AIDS Organization (CBTO)

Community Based TB/HIV/AIDS Organization (CBTO) is a community-based health and social welfare initiative that serves the Kamanga slum on the outskirts of Lusaka.  It runs a government-supported centre for TB/HIV/AIDS treatment and runs several supplementary services that are not government supported for infected and affected families in the community.

With assistance from the SLF, CBTO ensures that 200 of the slum’s neediest children are able, at a minimum, to receive a basic primary education. To that end, CBTO runs a community school for children ages five to nine years old with a curriculum that includes math, English, singing and creative lessons. All children receive a hot lunch meal every day. (For some, this is their only meal so this also helps ensure regular attendance). They also receive home health support, access to free medical check-ups and essential treatments, and psychosocial support — both counselling and recreation. As part of their education, children are taught their basic rights and where to go for help, and each pupil receives a complete uniform (including sports clothes) plus school supplies. The SLF’s funding also includes payment of three full-time teachers.

Community for Human Development

Community for Human Development, founded in 1999, works in four Zambian provinces (Central, Southern, Eastern and Lusaka) where they operate ten community schools; develop women’s enterprises via capacity-building, micro-financing schemes and assistance with marketing local products; and provide prevention-education, care and support to people living with or affected by HIV/AIDS. The Stephen Lewis Foundation partners with Community for Human Development to provide overall administrative support, and offer special assistance to needy orphans and granny-caregivers. The administrative support allows the organization to pay allowances to several key staff members who could only work part-time before as they lacked regular income. Within the communities, the project provides help with education, especially for poor girls who have qualified to attend secondary school. It also provides very vulnerable grandmothers who care for orphans with supplementary food to help ensure a basic and healthy diet.

Crown’s Valley of Hope

Crown’s Valley of Hope is a small faith-based organization that aims to “love and support people living with HIV/AIDS”. Crown’s Valley of Hope works with a hands-on Board of Directors consisting of 11 members, plus 50 caregivers and 10 teachers. The SLF recently started partnering with Crown’s Valley of Hope. With the Foundation’s support, Crown’s Valley of Hope aims to educate widows and orphans about their rights, for example, against early marriages, child labour and trafficking, discrimination against girls and people living with HIV, and property-grabbing of a widow’s home and belongings. To provide practical tools to fight these harmful practices, they are introducing a will-writing campaign and are working with churches, community leaders and local schools to educate people about their rights in accordance with Zambian law. The SLF also provides a subsidy to help caregivers start income-generating projects, and to help extremely needy children attend school. Two staff members are receiving computer training and some administrative expenses are paid.

Immanuel's OVC Project

Immanuel’s Project started in 2006 when a group of Lusaka-based HIV activists felt compelled to help as many of the 720,000 children in Zambia who have been orphaned by HIV as they could. They realized that they could only make a small difference as the problem is so big, but they also knew that every little bit helps.

The aim of Immanuel’s Project is to help orphans and vulnerable children in the Chelstone area of Lusaka to reach their full potential by providing them with educational, nutritional, medical and psychosocial supports, as well as support to improve their livelihoods. More broadly, the Project aims to advocate for the passage and implementation of child-friendly legislation and policies.

Thanks to SLF funding, trained community mobilizers work with programme staff to identify needy orphans, distribute school materials and conduct home visits, which includes supplemental nutrition. Additionally, staff conducts lifeskills training and workshops on HIV care and prevention, directed to teenagers, guardians and other stakeholders. Administrative and staff support for these activities is provided by the Foundation.

International Trust for the Education of Zambian Orphans (ITEZO)

When helping poor orphans obtain an education, our partners know that children can’t properly study on an empty stomach, and that the food they get at school may be the only meal they eat all day. Thus, when the International Trust For The Education Of Zambian Orphans (ITEZO) selects an orphan for educational support, they also provide vegetable seedlings to the child’scaregiver. An additional benefit is that the family sees the orphan contributing to their welfare, not just benefiting her- or himself by going to school. ITEZO also encourages students to develop their own vegetable gardens as an out-of-school activity to improve their own nutrition and also benefit other members of their household.

ITEZO began as the Zambian Support Group in Geneva in 1991, when women mobilised donations of second-hand clothing, toys and educational material that they sent to Zambian schools. Soon, the initiative expanded to include small community projects such as hammer mills (for grinding corn and other grains), boreholes, a piggery and chicken raising. SLF support helps ITEZO send orphans to secondary school or for vocational training, provide these orphans with basic medical care, offer training in mat-making as an income generating activity for widows and orphans at home, and organize peer education workshops on HIV awareness and care. Additionally, SLF support helps with backyard gardens to improve nutrition and administrative support.

Kabwata Widows and Orphans Community Support (KWOCS)

Kabwata Widows and Orphans Community Support (KWOCS) supports about 300 women-headed households and over 700 orphans in Zambia’s Copperbelt region. This is really an extraordinary feat for a small, grassroots organization whose members come from the same community — and in part, similar circumstances — as their beneficiaries do.

SLF’s assistance helps KWOCS empower women-headed households, provide orphans with educational expenses to attend primary school and support care-giving grandparents and people living with HIV and AIDS (PLWHA) with much needed economic and nutritional support. Priority is given to low-income children who stay with grandparents or other relatives and also to PLWHA so that they can remain healthy, adhere to their treatment regimen, and continue caring for their children. Small loans for agricultural inputs and seeds help beneficiaries boost their food production and business activities, thus achieving self-reliance over time. The women involved decide upon repayment conditions and procedures, and determine how the defaulting of loans will be addressed. They are also trained on how to start up and manage a small business.

The SLF also supports KWOCS with staff training as well as with other administrative and staffing costs.

St. Mark's Congregation Widows Group

The St. Mark’s Widows Group is a faith-based group of widows in Lusaka who, knowing what it feels to experience loss, have reached out to help people living with HIV and AIDS, orphans and their caregivers. This last group includes both widows and grandmothers who look after orphans and other vulnerable family members. The remarkable thing about this group is that they could have directed all of their concern inwardly to their own members. But instead, they decided that the best way to help themselves is to help others. Thus, they hold fund-raisers, pay small monthly dues each month, and conduct home visits on a voluntary basis to encourage and assist people who are seriously ill. The SLF assists these home-based care efforts with the provision of food and household items to assist vulnerable households, including low-income widows, grandmothers and orphans. Three of the homes they regularly visit are child-headed, and these get special attention. The SLF also provides small allowances for caregivers and has given the group a computer and printer.

Third World Images Project (TWIP)

The Third World Images Project (TWIP) started out as a theatre group in 1983, led by the late Mambwe Mulenga. Its aim was to create HIV awareness through campaigns in schools, public markets, social clubs and the like. While TWIP still conducts various street dramas, it has since transformed an old building provided by the Kitwe Municipality into a multi-purpose Youth Centre and now conducts a wide range of Centre-based and home-based care activities for adolescent mothers, orphans and vulnerable children, and teens who are HIV-positive. With SLF support, the organization also promotes voluntary counselling and testing, provides recreational activities and psychosocial support, offers supplemental nutrition to people living with HIV, supports orphans in school, and facilitates vocational studies. Jonathan Mwape, TWIP’s lead advisor, sometimes refers to his own life as an orphan. “I can identify with the young people we serve,” he says. “I see myself in their eyes.”

This personalized approach has been critical to TWIP’s success. TWIP works closely with each one of their beneficiary families and knows them well. Recently, they added a focus on human rights and gender-based violence, linking these to the prevention and mitigation of HIV. The SLF also pays for the training of peer-educators, exchange visits for teens living with HIV, administrative expenses and the capacity building of staff.

Young, Happy, Healthy and Safe

If you phone this organization, the person picking up the phone will greet you with just one word, “Happy!” Staff explain that they shorten the name of Young, Happy, Healthy and Safe to this single attribute because that is their ultimate goal — and they add that this is it is a reasonable outcome if youth can be helped to stay free of disease and violence, and can exercise their human rights. Thus, “Happy” focuses on to improving the sexual, reproductive and psychosocial health of young people aged 10-24 years, which includes reducing the spread of HIV and supporting those who are affected by the pandemic. The organization offers life-skills education for young people both in and out of school, and helps rural health centres provide accessible, youth-friendly services such as counselling, HIV testing, treatment for sexually transmitted infections, anti-retroviral treatment for HIV, and safer sex methods. (e.g. condoms). They also work with local health care practitioners, teachers, community advocates, traditional leaders and parents in order to change harmful gender and cultural practices and facilitate income- generating activities for households that are most-in-need. 

SLF support allows “Happy” to conduct outreach activities and training on the key drivers of HIV infection, and to provide older orphans and women with entrepreneurship skills and resources (usually piglets and chickens) to start their own small-businesses. The Foundation also makes it possible for 90 impoverished orphans to attend school and it pays for some administrative expenses.

Zambia National Antiretroviral Treatment Support Programme (ZNARVS)

When the Zambia National Antiretroviral Treatment Support Programme (ZNARVS) started in 2004, their goal was to initiate a support group for people living with HIV and AIDS (PLWHA) in every health clinic in the country, both for the direct benefit of the PLWHA  and to ensure outreach services and quality-of-care at the clinic itself. The support groups started with a few strong individuals and have since grown to about 5,500 members in 67 support groups across the country’s Lusaka, Eastern, Western and Southern provinces. Further efforts are underway to expand the groups even more, both in size (especially in outlying areas) and in number (to 75 groups or more). 

Initially, the groups focused on the participation of PLWHAs in fighting stigma and discrimination, and on actively promoting their own health care and that of family members. Subsequently, the groups added various socio-economic activities for improved food security and sustainable incomes, including training in entrepreneurship and financial management. They also conduct outreach activities to encourage voluntary counselling and testing, advocate for improved access to treatment, and educate community members on human rights. To help maintain and expand this programme, SLF helps pay for several staff salaries, supervision, monitoring and evaluation expenses, and some administrative costs.

• Project descriptions last updated April 2011