Social capacity building among communities hit by AIDS in Zambia

Even in the poorest societies there are people who are willing to do voluntary work. Lifeline in Zambia assists local churches by organising the help they give to orphans.

A local NGO in Zambia has found a perfect way to help churches to work together in the formation of social networks. This has enormous practical and emotional importance for children who have lost one or both of their parents due to AIDS.
Volunteer church parishioners care for these children and help them with food, schooling and life skills. The project is run by Lifeline in Zambia and is financed by the Rockwool Foundation.
AIDS is a huge problem in Zambia, which has one of the highest incidences of HIV in the world. AIDS is one of the principal causes of death among the young and middle-aged in the population.
This means that thousands of children in the country have lost one or both of their parents to the illness, and now live with their grandparents or other family members. It is of vital importance, then, that there are local resources for combating AIDS and its consequences.

A volunteer wearing his orange t-shirt with the text Bringing Faith Hope and Love to the Needy. He is visiting Berlita Mwandama, who cares for her grandchildren because their parents are dead. But she is ill herself.

Lifeline in Zambia, led by the social entrepreneurs Lene Pedersen and Maron Musamba, has discovered that there are substantial resources to draw upon among the many different churches in Zambia – and that these resources are often not being used optimally, because the churches’ efforts are not sufficiently well organised and coordinated.
The vast majority of the population of Zambia belongs to one of these many church communities. For many people church life is an important element in their culture and their everyday existence in their local communities. The churches often take the lead in social and humanitarian work, since the state has neither the money nor the capacity to shoulder responsibility for the needs of society.

Working together in the community

The church is often an important opinion-forming institution and thus has a vital role to play in fighting discrimination and stigmatization of AIDS victims. The first step is to get local priests and church elders from the various churches to understand the advantages of working together in the community. When that message has been taken on board, the priests and elders return to their churches and find three or four of their parishioners who are willing to act as voluntary social workers among families affected by AIDS, and to help orphaned children.

The project helps Berlita Mwandama (right) by paying for schooling for her three grandchildren. She is 65 years old, a widow, and has lost six of her own children.

The volunteers participate in courses and receive training for their task. In the process, a community spirit is built up among them that cuts across church denominations. In addition, Lifeline arranges regular follow-up courses where practical training is mixed with communal meals, singing and church services.

The volunteers are unpaid

Volunteers work two days per week. They do, however, enjoy great support and recognition from their local communities, because they have been selected and sent for training by the entire community – not just their own churches. In consequence, they feel very proud to wear their orange uniforms around the parish.

Food, education and encouragement

The project supports children with schooling, special food for malnourished children, training in life skills, construction of activity centres, and advice and encouragement in general. All the practical help is provided by community volunteers from the various churches. AIDS is partly responsible for the fact that Africa is still marked by overwhelming poverty. Together, AIDS and poverty form a vicious circle in which hunger and malnourishment weaken the body’s immune defences. This means that people are more easily infected with the HIV virus and by other illnesses, and also that people develop full-blown AIDS and the many consequential illnesses more quickly than they would otherwise do. People suffering from AIDS are in no condition to work and to care for themselves or their families, and in fact place an added burden on their families’ already scarce resources and labour. This means that the fields are often poorly tended, with bad harvests, lack of food, malnourishment and greater poverty as the outcome. At the same time, hunger and poverty drive many into prostitution. AIDS thus contributes to increasing poverty, while at the same time poverty and hunger contribute to the spread of HIV and its rapid development into AIDS. This vicious circle of poverty and AIDS is the cause of indescribable suffering in Africa and means that families and, indeed, entire communities are never able to realise their potential, but simply cave in to their problems.

Caring for their grandchildren

The Kunda family living in the slums of Chipulukusu has been hit hard. The family members spoke openly about their lives when they were visited by representatives of the Rockwool Foundation. Patrisio Kunda (68) and his wife Malizyoze (52) have had twelve children altogether. Five of them are dead. The old couple now care for four of their grandchildren who have lost both their parents.

Patrisio Kunda and his wife Malizyoze with one of their grand children.

Previously, they could not afford the cost of schooling for the grandchildren. But now the children are attending school again because the project pays for their uniforms, shoes, books, etc. Malizyoze explains that the project has helped them in many ways. Each week, a volunteer comes to visit, to talk to them and the children, and to give them encouragement. This is important, because orphans are often looked down upon. Even though the project pays school fees, it often turns out that orphans are discriminated against; they are sometimes refused admission to examinations and thus cannot get their certificates to prove that they have attended school. In such cases the volunteers step in and speak up on behalf of the children.  

More focus on food security and income gernerating activities

The Rockwool Foundation will continue its support to Lifeline in their effort to build social capacity. In the future, the Foundation will increasingly focus on helping in rural areas and in supporting families hit by AIDS to produce sufficient food to cover their needs. It is very important that the vicious circle of poverty and AIDS is broken. Hunger is often the greatest problem for families of AIDS victims. Even though drugs to combat AIDS are available free of charge from clinics in Zambia, this does not guarantee that the sick actually take this medicine. The drugs can have serious side effects if taken on an empty stomach. One of these is to increase the already unbearable feeling of hunger. As a result, many choose not to take the medicine, and subsequently die faster. In Africa, then, the fight against AIDS must go hand in hand with the fight against hunger.

A good strategy for helping orphan children and AIDS sick in need of care is through empowering the caretakers. In the rural areas where most families rely almost exclusively on agriculture for food and income it is important to build the capacity of AIDS affected families to produce enough food to meet the household demand. This must be achieved by introducing labour saving farming methods - simply because it is the young and middle-aged who are worst hit by AIDS. And these are the bread winners of the families. The project will increasingly focus on farming and income generating activities and thereby help vulnerable households to foot the bills for school expenses and other household needs.