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Rains bring hope for good harvest this year.

We have positive news to report from our friends in Monze this year as the rains have thankfully come.

Whilst this news brings hope for a good harvest in 2025, the harvest is still months away.  Consequences of the historic drought of 2023/4 are ongoing with food shortages and deepening hunger .

The generous support of our donors enabled BFZ to provide the 84 households registered to the Orphan and Vulnerable child community with emergency relief, mitigating hunger.

     

In January this year, BFZ provided emergency aid; mealie meal, salt and oil.  Here are two of the groups receiving the much-needed aid.

We are immensely proud to be able to help the communities in times of extreme crisis, but aid is not our usual mode of operation.  The OCHA (The UN Organisation for the Coordination of Humanitarian Aid) report;

With the rise in global temperatures and changing weather patterns, climate change threatens to bring more frequent and severe extreme weather to Southern Africa.

The role of BFZ is to build resilience in the face of these increasingly frequent challenges.  Our projects are always developed with resilience in mind.

One such project encouraging financial sustainability is Community Banking; the training was delivered thanks to the support of donors.

This is the banking group in Kachiloma, the most rural community group supported by BFZ.  They have used savings from the village banking scheme to launch a reed mat making enterprise. The group make mats together and the proceeds go into the village savings pot, which individuals can bid for loans for their needs or to launch their own income raising initiatives.  

The video below is of Nadiya, one of the women in the group, who takes part in the village savings scheme.

She is saying that the village banking has helped her a lot, when there has been no income she has got a loan to buy food or books for the children. She says that before she would have to borrow from friends, but the village banking scheme is different as she can save within the scheme and then is able to take out funds in times of need.  

Community banking  is one of many projects supporting resilience in the Monze district.  This would not happen without the continued generous support of our donors – Thank you!

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Low Rainfall Levels, Poor Crops.

By Katie Anne Smith, Brighter Futures Zambia co-founder and trustee

Zambia is currently experiencing a prolonged drought caused largely by the low rainfall during the ‘rainy season’ which runs from November to March.

This season rains did not arrive until January and were then light and sporadic. The Southern Province, where the community groups BFZ support are located, is worst affected.

Households are running down their food stocks and relying on market purchases and the price of maize, the staple food, has skyrocketed as government stores run dry.

Maize being cut from cobs very depleted harvest, this is for a household with 12 children for one year.

The households we support are already the most vulnerable, often headed by older females and housing several children, they stand to suffer the most. Most of the homes we support rely on the small maize crops they grow to be stored and last throughout the year, and this year these crops failed.

During my visit in April/ May, the fields of maize were a truly sorry sight; endless fields of stunted, desiccated husks where armies of tall plants should have been ripening for harvest. Worse still, the groups informed me that crops of groundnuts, sweet potatoes and beans which usually supplement diets, had also entirely failed.

Here at Brighter Futures Zambia we are ready to help where we can, whilst realising that the scale of the situation requires intervention on a far larger scale.

Thanks to a generous grant we are able to offer a meal supplement to the children who attend our Miyoba preschool; 40% of Zambian children in this age group suffer stunting from malnourishment, so we want to focus on these children as a priority.

The meals that we provide to the children from our seven community groups at our weekly wellbeing sessions will continue to be provided and will be especially important and the children who we sponsor to school will benefit from school meals.

We are discussing further ways we can help with our team in Zambia, but any programme will need FUNDING and we would be very grateful for any support that you can offer.

IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT THE WORK WE DO PLEASE CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFORMATION OR GET IN TOUCH.

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