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Chingola

AIDS Orphans Project in Chingola

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AIDS Orphan Project in Chingola

In 1994 in the Lusaka Declaration on Support to Children and Families Affected by AIDS, many NGOs working in the field of AIDS expressed the importance of keeping children orphaned by their parents dying of the disease, wherever possible, in their communities. As there are few facilities for orphaned children, those that are not looked after within their extended families and communities end up living rough as street children in the shanty towns around the towns and cities of Zambia. At present it is estimated that over 90,000 children live on Zambia's streets or in the bush. The overseas development assistance that is targeting AIDS has rather neglected the so-called "orphan epidemic". Both domestic and overseas financial support tends to favour hospital-based programmes and expenditure on testing kits and the salaries of doctors and nurses in its battle against the disease.

In Chingola in Northern Zambia the British Aid Agency CAFOD funds a community based project that is concerned with expanding the education opportunities for orphaned children. An orphan support group farms five acres of land and sells the produce to raise finance to pay for school fees and other basic needs. In Zambia there is now no free state education as school fees were introduced in the 1990s as part of the government's attempt to reduce its budget deficit and the level of inflation. The support group also operates another two acres, which is used to teach farming skills to the children so that when they grow up they have some knowledge of agricultural skills so that they can survive.

The Chairwomen of the group, Emilia Kumwenda, herself the carer for 11 orphans sees education as the key to reducing the HIV/AIDS epidemic. She runs a nursery and an Anti-AIDS club for older children where they receive education about the virus. She says "we recruit children who are not orphans as well so they will mix and see each other as normal". The need to remove the stigma associated with AIDS is seen as important if the process of education is to slow down the spread of the disease.

CAFOD
The Catholic Agency for Overseas Development or CAFOD is one of the United Kingdom's largest development and relief organisations, funding more than 1,000 projects in Africa, Asia, the Pacific, Latin America, the Caribbean and Eastern Europe. Like a number of NGOs they are associated to a church although they state "that they are committed to justice for the world's poor and excluded, whatever their race or religion".

They campaign on a number of development issues, such as poverty, land mines, child soldiers, primary health care, water provision and AIDS education. They support with finance and expertise a number of projects that attempt to promote community awareness and action reducing poverty and injustice. Like many NGOs they believe that change takes time and must be initiated and managed by those at local level. Too often projects have failed because the local community was not sufficiently involved.

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