Community Building & Sustainability
We believe that happy children need healthy communities, and we work with our community groups to build capacity and promote sustainability.
Seeding income generation activities is part of our mission to reduce donor dependency and help our partners move towards financial sustainability. We support communities to be more sustainable through:
- Our Good Goat programme, which provides goats, which supplement family income and continue to benefit the community through the ‘pass it on’ methodology. Learn more about the Good Goat.
- BFZ Christmas stars; beautiful stars in vibrant African fabrics, handmade by our community group members. We buy the stars from our community groups at a fair price and offer for a small donation. Read more in this case study.
- Tailoring, which upskills our community groups in the production of school uniforms to be sold locally.
- Group agriculture, where female group members who run households club together resources to grow crops to feed their families.
- Village banking scheme, which provides training & ongoing support in community savings, allowing community members to draw down small grants to start businesses or cover unexpected expenses for health or other emergencies.
Community Training
We empower our community group members with skills and knowledge to support them to care for and provide healthy homes for the children in their care. We offer the following training on an ongoing basis to our community groups:
- Water Sanitation and Hygiene Training. More than 36 per cent of Zambia’s population lack access to safe water and 76 per cent of households do not have access to a hand washing facility. Our training covers sanitation, hygiene, waste management and teaches practical skills such as building tippy-tap handwashing stations from recycled materials.
- Children’s rights and Counselling Training, which teaches caregivers basic counselling skills, children’s rights and knowledge on gender based violence, grief and bereavement, behaviour change & communication skills, child abuse and protection, and sexual health.
- Sustainability and tree planting. We work with local trainers to develop our communities’ capacity to adapt in the face of climate change. Training equips them with understanding on planting, soil management, home composting, fertilising, landscaping to retain ground water and avoid flooding and nutrition. BFZ provides seedlings to communities to grow native plants and trees, which provide nutrition and improve the local environment.
“As a woman I’m happy to be part of this workshop because in most cases women have been discriminated against especially when making decisions in our communities.” Community group member and Counselling Training participant
Make a donation to support us to build strong and sustainable communities.
