Community Project Work

Caregiver Training:  We’ve really enjoyed seeing the progress of our Caregivers through an on-going series of training sessions.  Led by our ECD Trainer, along with support from St Andrew’s International Primary School, these have been largely workshop based covering a range of subjects such as making TALULAR resources, reading and telling stories, number activities and games, learning through play, child development and disability awareness/inclusion.

The Caregivers have increasingly embraced this training and are now putting it into practice with the self-initiated implementation of learning journals for the children. 

 WASH, Nutrition and Parent Awareness Training:  Awareness is a fundamental first step along the road to making a sustainable positive impact in our communities.  At our DFID centres we’ve been able to introduce training programs where we have provided workshops on gender equality, child safeguarding, childhood ailments and diseases and family planning.

We’ve also been able to hold two-day WASH (Water, Sanitation and Hygiene) and Nutrition workshops across these centres.  These two topics go hand in hand towards helping helping people stay healthy and safe.  We like to make these sessions as interactive as possible as we find our attendees are most receptive to hands-on training so we try and keep the group sizes small but repeat them three times at each centre to ensure that they are accessible to everyone.

Through these sessions, parents have made child friendly toilets and learnt about basic hygiene rules to help keep their families safe.  We’ve also covered how to cook more healthily, the importance of a balanced diet and how to make juice from locally available fruits such as the baobab fruit and the importance of vitamins in our diet.

 Kitchen Garden Committees:  We have loved seeing the fruits, sometimes quite literally, of our Kitchen Garden Committees.  We organised training for these members who have now set up a kitchen garden near each CBCC where crops are grown.  These provide supplementary food to the likuni phala such as carrots or sweet potatoes, or they can alternatively be used as a cash crop to purchase fruit for the children.

Members also had the opportunity to go on compost training and we are currently looking into the possibility of compost toilets to make this a sustainable option for future development.