Zimbabwe

Zimbabwe has one of the highest HIV prevalence rates in the world. 20.1% of adults aged 15-49 are living with the virus – an estimated 1.7 million Zimbabweans. Of these, 160,000 are children. The latest figures estimate that 1.1 million children have been orphaned and made vulnerable by the epidemic, causing tremendous strain on communities.

What we do

The Alliance works in partnership with three community-based organisations in Zimbabwe working with orphans and children affected by HIV and AIDS.

The programme’s highest priority is to scale up the coverage of effective, community-focused support for orphans and vulnerable children. This will be achieved mainly by providing small- and medium-sized grants to partners to carry out activities within ‘Building Blocks’ thematic areas.The programme has established links with partners who can identify religious co-ordinating bodies and other networks with the capacity to pass on small grants to community-based initiatives. In the underserved district of Bulilimangwe in Matabeleland South, other non-governmental, faith-based and community-based organisations working with orphans and vulnerable children have also been identified and supported.

The other main activity is strengthening the leadership and capacity of civil society to respond to the needs of orphans and vulnerable children. This capacity-building includes providing targeted technical assistance to individual programme partners, offering collective capacity-building training workshops, and organising exchange visits and mentoring relationships.

The community-based organisations supported by the partnership to carry out this work all focus on mobilising and training the community to provide adequate care and support for orphans and vulnerable children. This includes providing child counselling and identifying children’s needs so they can be adequately met.

One of these projects, for example, mobilises voluntary child welfare and social services professionals, as well as community members and their leaders, and provides them with training on orphan care. The objective is for communities and their leaders to form committees that run and manage community-based care programmes for orphans and vulnerable children and for both in- and out-of-school young people. Life-skills camps are also organised, where children are empowered with important life skills that will enable them to better manage the burden of heading households and consequently improve their means to sustain themselves.

In another example, a community-based organisation works with church volunteers to provide home-based care and support to orphans. A national committee of co-ordinators is training volunteers and church leaders in their areas, with the aim of increasing the self-sufficiency of 1,500 families in Matabeleland by June 2005, by providing training as well as agricultural and livestock inputs. A central feature of this project is to facilitate child-centred workshops with community caregivers and volunteers. These aim not only to empower the children but to enable carers to identify accurately children’s needs and ensure that care programmes are child sensitive.The training is done through a combination of methods that included lectures, role plays, group exercises, games, plenary discussions, drawing and music.

What have achieved

The programme focuses on all vulnerable children, not just those affected by HIV and AIDS, and has reached over 50,000 children since 2004. The work has developed integrated, child-centred services, with all children involved in decision-making and implementation. It has supported interventions owned and managed by communities, and integrated prevention activities into all its work. This includes education, with a focus on life skills, peer education and links with neighbouring youth programmes concerned with prevention.

An evaluation of this work was carried out in 2005.