1. Community Schools

Some children in communities cannot afford to go to school. This is either due to the fact that they are orphans or really vulnerable and that their remaining family cannot afford to send them to school. Without help these children are likely to struggle in future due to a lack of education, skill and social inclusion The need for the children of Zambia to be educated is of utmost importance. This education enables children to break out of the poverty cycles that they are either born in to, or left in, after the death of parents. It gives them the hope for a better future .

The organization started with one community schools in Kitwe and Nakonde. As well as other initiatives, we currently run schools in Chibuluma as well as working with nearly 600 children in Lumwana East in the Northwestern province. To date, we have identified 150 children who were not being educated in Robert’s compound, and we now have classes from grades 1 to 6 in a one-room building lent to us by a Church in the area. The Schools are in desperate need of materials such as blackboards and chalk, readers, teachers’ guides and exercise books. These materials, though seemingly very basic, would greatly increase the productivity of the teaching, and the quality of education that the children would be receiving. Long term, we hope to provide the children with more adequate school buildings, and expand to having more teachers and teaching higher grades. At the moment however, we feel that this purchase of basic school materials will affect a lot of children’s lives in a big way. An example of this is that exercise books and pencils enable the children to practice writing, an essential skill, which they are unable to do without these basic materials.

Community School in Lumwana East

Lumwana East Community School is loacated in Lumwana East in Chief Mukumbi Area in the Northwestern Priovince - some 100Km away from the Provincial Town, Solwezi. Lumwana is fast growing town because of the newly opened mine called Lumwana Mine, the second largest mine in the World. Due to the mining activities happening in the area, there is an influx of people from different towns and countries going to the area hence making the area more prone to diseases such as the deadly disease -HIV/AIDS, which is leaving a big number of orphaned children and widows. This brought concern to CFZ and we thought of extending our projects to the area. After doing a research, we were able to identify about 108 children who are both orphans and vulnarable children wthin the community, and 25 both widows and vulnerable women who needed quick help such as survival projects. We had put all these children in school starting from nursery to grade 2. The number of children in school now stands at 600 and they are all attending school. The Organisation is using church buildings as classrooms until we build our own structures by the help of Lumwana Mine who have agreed to fund the projects. We currently have 3 volunteer teachers. So we really need more partners to help us improve the living standards for the orphans, vulnarable children and widows in the Area.

2. Women Empowerment Groups

!The organization also helps vulnerable women and widows by encouraging them into small business. Groups of women are given a small amounts of money and are encouraged to use existing skills in order to form a profitable business. One of the short-term running projects for the Women Empowerment Groups is in Nakonde and Kitwe which are involved in selling drink and food from chilled mobile units, which has proved a great success! But this is not enough to keep these women empowered, we have on our agenda much more bigger projects such as buying them hammer mills, and help them do chicken farming which can give them more income and in turn support themselves and their families. As you may know, women are more vulnerable to poverty than men due to lower levels of education and limited chance of formal employment. And from our own research, we found that women are also disproportionately affected by the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and are also more vulnerable to HIV and other related infections as they are relatively weaker culturally to protect themselves against male friends who might be already infected. So CFZ has put this as one of the priorities in order to fight for these women's human rights. However, we can only achieve this if only we can find serious funders

3. HIV/AIDS Activities

The HIV/AIDS epidemic is a big challenge to the community and affects the socio-economic cycle of our communities as it has no boundaries. Because of this, prevention efforts must aim at reducing the HIV/AIDS impact on the family, and reduce HIV transmission in our communities through education and awareness campaign. In order to prevent the further spread of HIV/AIDS and mitigate its impact on individuals and communities we provide support to community based initiatives. The NGO has in this year planned to undertake HIV/AIDS awareness programmes and workshops in Kitwe and Lumwana and would therefore need cooperating partners to assist us meet our goals.