My first use in Zimbabwe

Some news from Zimbabwe! This Monday was my first big day! We had our first meeting with all of the partner organizations that I will be working with. They are eight NGO's, all of them working with Orphans and Vulnerable Children (hereafter OVC, in our NGO slang). Four of them work in Harare, the capital, and four of them in Bulawayo, 280km or 6 hours driving to the west. They all touch different aspects of these issues, street children, re-education, counselling, HIV prevention, and a big emphasis is put on psychosocial support. But what they all have in common is that they're trying to train people from the community to take care of these problems, so that they themselves try to meet the challenges. For it isn't easy.

In Zimbabwe, between 20 and 30% of the adult population is HIV positif. The life expectancy has dropped in ten years to an average of 35 years! More than a million children are orphans, often taking care of siblings, which forms one tenth of the population. Before, these children were taken in by family structures, but these are now stretched far beyond their capacity. Putting them in in orphanages is also impossible and would certainly not guarantee proper education. So, they fall back on their community, and to support the community is what our eight partnerorganisations are trying to do.

I must admit I was a bit stressed about our first meeting. First impressions matter, I know from experience, and if we would have gotten off on the wrong foot, it is always hard to correct. I was supposed to have arrived in the beginning of April, which would have allowed me to visit the organizations one by one and get to know them better in a more relaxed way, but since our departure had been delayed several times due to the elections and the resulting instability, I only arrived in the country five days before hand. And to add to my stress, the desk officer from Brussels as well as our regional coordinator, Kristien, with whom we worked in South Africa.

But it went great! Volens doesn't have a lot of money to give, so we have to make the partner organizations understand what we can sponsor (which isn't that much), and what we can't (which is a lot more)! In short, the programme that I am part of can assist them in four main ways:

- attachments: it consists of exchanges of staff members between the organisations, for often, they tend to ignore or worse, compete with organizations active in the same field. This was the mean item on the agenda, to see who wanted to offer what, and I must say, it was amazing! Truly, I have rarely had to facilitate such an enthusiasm and interesting topics that each ONG offered. Specific methodology to do counselling, to work with peers, assure child participation etc. Honestly, impressive! The local expertise definitely sounds great. Now, we had about 15 attachments to offer, but after they all stated their areas of expertise or specific activities that could be interesting for the others, and we went round per month to see who wanted to send a number of staff to attend, well, we got to 332 attachments planned! But I believe we can make most of them happen, even with our limited means, if the ONG themselves also contribute. This can be done evry easily, if they take accommodation or board upon them, instead of putting them in expensive hotels.

- scholarships: staff members can follow trainings regarding specific issues, so that they can improve their functioning.

- specific capacity building on Monitoring & Evaluation and Financial Management: we have two cooperants that are working specifically on these issues, essential in nowadays working with projects and development, so they are there to

- the overall coordinating of the network: that would be yours truly, together with Veerle, the former coordinator for this region. First task will be to visit all of the organisations and document the different trainings that are provided, in one comprehensive basic package. We are also going to integrate a platform started up by UNICEF in September 2007, which is specifically regarding psychosocial support and capacity building.

All of this has to do with our work on three levels, the capacity building on the level of

- people: better trained staff etc.
- organizations: better equipped to follow up the projects,
- interinstitutionnal: they work together, share experiences etc...

All sounds a bit complicated and much NGO vocabulary right? Anyway, it is really looking good and I love it for the moment, so I suppose for my readers that is the most important, no?