Presentation at the Signing of MOU with the Municipality & the Department of Community Development

Last Updated on Monday, 08 February 2010 12:09 Written by Webmaster Monday, 08 February 2010 12:03

This is an important day in the development of the Preparation for Social Action Program. As an organisation it is a day we have been working towards for over a year now. The signing of this memorandum of understanding, we believe, will make a great difference in the way the program is implemented and in the impact it will have at the local community level.

In order to inderstand the implications of the development we are here to witness, I will begin by paintaining a scenerio of our expectations.

Our communities, urban and rural, face many challenges, challenges that we all know too well; increasing numbers of families do not have enough to eat through out the year; the environment keeps getting worse and in many communities the land can no longer produce the same amount of food as it did before; many families are subjected to massive stress as a result of disease, most of it avoidable; even with increase in level of enrolment, there is still not enough opportunies for quality education and many young people finish seconday school only to find that the opportunities in society are much more limited than they imagined. Many efforts to deal with these challenges, especially those that are driven by agencies from outside the community, efforts in which the community is given some peripheral role, have, after expenditure of huge sums of money and deployment of large numbers of experts, surprisingly, had only mimimal effect. Communities are becoming increasingly hopeless, increasingly cynical, as they watch effort after effort come and go while their condition remains mostly unchanged and in many cases worse.

The situation is complex. Clearly, if solving the challenges our communities face was simple we would have done so a long time ago. That they persist is an indication of their complexity. It is clear, even to those that may not readily admit, that there are no simple or easy solution. What has come to be accepted by most development actors is that meaninful and sustainable change cannot be achieved without the community taking full responsibility for its own development. Unless the local population becomes the major energy behind development efforts there can never be sustainable change. The challenge of development has therefore come to be understood by many actors as a challenge of capacity building. At the heart of the endeavor of development is the need to build the capacity of the local population to make collective decisions, to undertake unified action, and to reflect on their endeavors in a manner that ensures the increased effectiveness their actions.

Therefore if we are to be successful in our efforts to foster development we must deal with the question of mobilisation of the local community. The question is simple yet complex. How are we to ensure that the local community assumes responsibility for its own development? Who will carry out the mobilisation and how? Who will be mobilised? Regarding the last question we, of course, cannot talk about mobilisation of the local community without dealing with the question of the role young people will play in the process. The youth are the majority in our local communities, are a reserve of energy and initiative, are driven by a vision, unclear as it sometimes may be, of a society they want to create for themselves and their children, and have time on their side.  When they find something that captures their imagination, they are like a mighty river generating energy and giving impetus to many processes. When they do not find a worthy cause to which to direct themselves they can easily become like a flood, dissipating their intellectual and physical energies.

With these ideas in mind let us now imagine a group of 14 young people in an urban or rural community that faces some of the challenges referred to above. These young people come into contact with the Preparation for Social Action Program and organise themselves to learn how they can contribute to the wellbeing of their community. Let us imagine the group as very diverse composed of girls and boys, most of them in their late teens and early 20s. Some of them have finished secondary school, while a few dropped out with completing their education. Some obtained reasonably good results in their Grade 12 exams but have struggled to enter institutions of higher learning. One or two may have even done a few short courses for which they paid large sums of money only to discover that they did not learn much from them and the courses did not guarantee them jobs. Others did not do very well at school and are unsure what they want to do with their lives. They hope to rewrite some of the subjects in which they did not do well but to do that they require money for registration and tuition. All of them bear the hope that some industry will open somewhere or some organisation will come into the community that will give them jobs allowing them to earn some money. But they know that even if that were to happen, they would be competing with a multitude others as they are not alone in this situation; it is a state of affairs that faces thousands of their peers.

By enrolling into the Preparation for Social Action Program these 14 young people have decided that, instead of spending their time unproductively, they will learn how they can contribute to the wellbeing of their community. The group is assisted by a tutor, a young person herself, who relates to their situation because she too comes from the same community and faces very similar challenges.

The group then begins to study a set of courses that help them develop a set of related capabilities:

·         They learn that in order to be effective in efforts to promote the wellbeing of the local community, they have to learn to accurately describe their social reality. They therefore need to improve their language abilities.

·         They learn to think about and describe reality, physical, social and spiritual, in terms of its properties and characteristics, to think and describe society in terms of its systems and processes, and to place current events into a historical context.

·          They learn that some mathematical capability is essential to the effort of promoting community wellbeing. They acquire the simple capability of classifying things which helps them increase their understanding of the nature of their communities. They also learn to apply the simple skills of adding and subtracting to the management of accounts of small businesses.

·         They learn to act scientifically and to approach action with a learning attitude; they learn to approach their actions in a scientific manner.

But above everything they learn that they can, in a practical way, contribute to the improvement of some key processes of the community. After studying a course on environmental issues they carry out research on the major environmental issues of the community. They discover that among the major challenges is the management and disposal of solid waste. They investigate, through conversations with community members, the patterns of thought and behavior that contribute to the problem of solid waste. They, as a result call for a meeting with the community leaders and share with them their findings and discuss with them possible solutions. The leaders are impressed that such young people can be so clear on how to improve the quality of their community and therefore commit to supporting them. Together they start an awareness campaign, educating the people on the how to reduce waste, how to reuse some of it and how to carefully dispose of that which cannot be reused. The understanding of the community is awakened and with it interest and commitment to dealing with the problems of solid waste, a problem that is responsible for unsanitary conditions and disease. Together with the community they decide on a number of actions to undertake on a personal, household and community level. All this culminates in a project through which an educational process is initiated and sustained; the community learns not to throw away everything they consider waste but to reuse what they can, and also to carefully, very carefully dispose of the rest. Regular clean up campaigns are called, drainages are unblocked, heaps of waste that attract vermin are removed, and the community begins to feel better about itself and its ability to take care of its physical environment.

The students learn a lot from the experience. They learn to express themselves in a clear and precise manner; they learn to engage in conversations with different types of people, to create unity of thought, and to mobilise the community in unified action. As they see the fruits of their work, their commitment to promoting the wellbeing of the community becomes stronger. Later, when they study courses in supporting food production on small farms, they establish a small project to help families learn how to use organic technologies in the production of food at a household level; when they study another course on Ecosystems, they initiate simple projects to restore stressed ecosystems to good health; they study a course on supporting the intellectual and moral development of young children and they establish simple children’s education activities at the community level.

As they become increasingly effective, the group attracts the attention of many institutions. The Neighborhood Health Committee would like them to help plan and carry out a malaria campaign; an organisation working with Orphaned and Vulnerable Children calls on some of them to help educate the children; the Municipal Council invites them to help organise community efforts in solid waste management; the Ministry of Community Development would like them to help those that are engaged in the Food Security Pack to improve their food production efforts.

7 members of the group decide that what interests them the most is activity in the area of the promoting a healthy physical environment and so they start a small community based effort to educate the community and mobilise them in actions to improve the quality of the environment. Other members are more interested in the area of food production and they start a small community based effort to support the endeavors of households to produce food on small plots in an environmentally sustainable manner. Therefore as a result of the activities of the PSA group two youth organisations are established and they start supporting two key community processes of environmental health and food production.

Capacity for development action has clearly increased in this community.  Capable human resources have been raised and new institutions and organisations have started to develop. When an environmental organisation from outside comes to work in the area, it finds that some systematic efforts driven by members of the community are already in motion. The agency therefore does not just allot the community a role in its activities as earlier organisations had done. It sees them as partners in development efforts; it respects their views and experience and sees its role not as solving the community’s problems but as supporting its efforts to deal with its most pressing challenges.

The scenario painted here is hypothetical but it is not totally imaginary. This room is full of young people who are already treading this path, who have already started these efforts.

·      The Chimanimani group has done a good and thorough research on solid waste management; the Site & Service group has done a similar research and started awareness raising at schools in Natuseko Ward.

·      The Natuseko group is beginning to work with the market community to learn how to manage solid waste generated at the market.

·      The Bethel Group has for the last 7 months been learning how to support families in the production of vegetables using organic technologies.

These efforts are small but they are profound and their implications are far reaching. We have no doubt that they will become elaborate and more organized and will have great impact on the community.

The Memorandum of Understanding being signed today will therefore help give more shape to the effort of raising large numbers of young people who are active participants in the development efforts of Kabwe District and of Zambia as a whole. It is bringing together three actors, Kabwe Municipal Council, the Ministry of Community Development, and Inshindo Foundation who, among others, share the common objective of contributing e to raising capacity in the community, capacity that will contribute to the improvement of many processes of community life. We are certain that the MOU will create a broad base of support to the groups and will strengthen the impact of their actions in the community.