PETAUKE LETTER:Faced with recession, many rural African communities are joining outreach programmes, writes BILL CORCORAN.
THE GLOBAL recession has finally reared its head in Zambia.
The southern African country’s flagship industry, copper mining, has seen prices fall dramatically since January and thousands of jobs have been lost due to mine closures and output reductions.
Despite strong economic growth in recent times, the bitter truth for most rural communities in these months before harvest, which begins around May, is that chronic food shortages are just an ill-fated turn of events away.
Driving from Lusaka, Zambia’s capital, across the Eastern Province towards the Malawian border, you get an insight into how arbitrary survival can be for people forced to rely on subsistence farming rather than a pay cheque for food.
On either side of the Grade East road that leads to the provincial town of Petauke, my destination, I passed countless abandoned homesteads that were painstakingly cleared of indigenous vegetation by farmers who hoped to cultivate crops.
What caused the inhabitants to leave the homes and fields they hacked out of the bush is anyone’s guess, but drought, disease and death are likely to have played a part.
A harsh reality in Zambia is that food insecurity and the impact of the HIV virus – the prevalence rate among the local population stands at 16 per cent – have decimated communities and pushed the survivors to the margins of society.
For children, the challenges that arise from this double bind have proved to be especially insurmountable; a walk through a rural graveyard here is testament to that.
The reasons why so many Zambians remain impoverished are complex and too numerous to examine in detail here. Suffice to say a colonial legacy, mismanagement, debt and disease have contributed to the country’s woes.
But not all is hopeless. I have come to Petauke, a small backwater town, to research a new development approach to assisting the district’s vulnerable children, many of whom are orphans living with relatives or in child-headed households.
Of the 156 schools in the area, 20 have been chosen by the ministry of education to participate in the outreach programme, which combines the efforts of government, aid agencies and the communities.
The Schools as Centres for Care and Support (SCCS) programme originated in South Africa in 2003, where it was developed as a response to the crippling effect of HIV on education by the Media in Education Trust (MiET), an independent education and child welfare organisation. It has saved the lives of thousands of HIV-positive children and adults there by getting them on to anti-retroviral drug programmes, and has improved the lives of many more suffering from the fallout of the poverty trap.
Due to this success, other regional countries have taken notice, with Zambia and Swaziland taking up the initiative as a pilot project that has run for the past 12 months. They too have become so impressed with the results that more schools are to be incorporated into the project over the coming year.
In rural African communities, schools have the greatest access to children and their families, which makes them ideally placed to run outreach programmes.
While the idea of targeting the needy through schools is not new, the SCCS uses a more multilateral approach that seems tailor made for these uncertain times, when resources and finances are scarce.
To ensure a co-ordinated and practical approach, the SCCS brings on board numerous international donor agencies and weaves their individual expertise into its own framework to create a safety net that helps a larger number of people.
At monthly meetings the participating agencies discuss developments and refer children with specific needs to specialist partners.
Why such a comprehensive outreach programme has not been implemented before remains a mystery to me, especially given the positive reaction the scheme has generally received from the participating communities.
Zambia’s poorest citizens have embraced the initiative with a zeal that appears sparked by the dark clouds of recession gathering overhead, and their “can-do” attitude has manifested itself in the form of mass volunteerism.
With training provided by the donor agencies, many villagers have become community caregivers whose job is to scour their districts, identify vulnerable and marginalised children, and bring them into the initiative’s fold.
The caregivers continue to watch over these children, often walking more than 10km each day to reach a child whose homestead is deep in the bush.
The children need supervision regarding issues such as taking their anti-retroviral drugs every day at the same time, or learning basic life skills such as hygiene and preparing nutritious food.
Whatever fuels the caregivers’ determination to overcome the staggering array of challenges they face should be bottled and sold on the streets of Ireland, where our ability to tackle adversity appears to have wilted in the heat of the current economic climate.