Zimbabwe

During 2010, the Community Foundation for the Western Region of Zimbabwe was working on expanding its work and made plans to include the ICDP principles in its Home-based Orphan Care Programme. 

As the name implies, home based orphan care is providing a family support or community support system to orphans and vulnerable children to experience quality family life and all safety nets that family life provides.  Some of the activities include sensitization workshops on family life, Early Childhood Development, child care skills, learning exchange/sharing experiences, health clinics, children’s rights, psychosocial support, resource mobilization for children’s activities, child protection mainstreaming, child participation and capacity building of care givers. The program is covering 9 districts but it is planned to extend it to all 25 districts in the western part of Zimbabwe. The intention is to employ the ICDP principles in achieving all the above stated activities.

Community Foundation for the Western Region of Zimbabwe is a unique, home-grown institution that weds access to the best global practices in community-led development with the time-honored traditions and knowledge of the Zimbabweans it serves. As the first grant making community foundation in the country, WRF mobilizes financial resources and technical assistance for local initiatives by serving as a co-financer, broker, and builder of partnerships between communities and the existing development actors in the region — and beyond.

Established in 1998, the foundation has steadily increased rural villagers’ access to resources that did not previously exist in the region. The aim of this support is to help communities bridge the deep cultural, geographic and economic divides that serve to exclude the people of Western Zimbabwe.

Although the foundation concentrates on five program areas — education, HIV/AIDS, women’s economic empowerment, youth development, and water and agriculture — these issues are often intertwined in the small, struggling villages of western Zimbabwe. “Communities come up with a lot of innovative coping mechanisms regarding the social and economic challenges they face,” said Moyo. And support in one program area can have wide and unexpected ripple effects throughout and across communities.