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Published to mark the Oscar van Leer Award 2005, this booklet describes in essay and photographs the work of the Kenya Orphans Rural Development Programme (KORDP) with orphans and vulnerable children in areas of western Kenya ravaged by the HIV/AIDS pandemic.
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The Oscar van Leer Award2005
The Oscar van Leer Award 2005
for excellence in enabling parents and communities to help young children realise their full potential
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Everyone knows that the HIV/AIDS pandemic is cutting down young adults
in their prime. But the world too rarely thinks of the children of those young adults.
Robbed of their parents, they must fall back on communities which themselves have
been debilitated by the loss of their most productive generation.
The Bernard van Leer Foundation works with partner organisations which take a
community-based approach to supporting HIV/AIDS orphans and vulnerable children.
Our partners explore ways to build the capacity of neighbours and extended families to
raise orphans and to support caregivers who cannot cope on their own.
Through the projects we fund, we also stress the importance of psychosocial
support in the development of these young children. We are midway through a series
of four international workshops on psychosocial support, bringing together experts
and practitioners from child-focused organisations. This issue should be high on the
agenda at the International AIDS Conference in Toronto in 2006.
Kenya Orphans Rural Development Programme (KORDP) is an exemplar of both
the community-based approach and psychosocial support. What does this mean in
practice? We sent writer Andrew Wright and photographer Wendy Stone to document
the work KORDP does on the ground in rural communities in Western Kenya. Their
depictions of KORDP’s activities occupy the pages that follow.
UNAIDS, the joint United Nations programme on HIV/AIDS, estimates that by 2010 the
disease will have left more than 20 million sub-Saharan African children without at least
one of their parents. In celebrating KORDP’s work, we point to one hopeful example of
how we can help those children to cope.
Peter Laugharn, Executive Director, Bernard van Leer Foundation
November 2005
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Doctors have died,
Teachers have died.
Mummy, daddy, do you know AIDS?
Take care, mummy.
Take care, daddy.
I don’t want to be left alone.
– Song sung by children in Yalusi early childhood development
centre, Bungoma District, Kenya
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Eight hours from Nairobi: across the Great Rift Valley, with its roadside stalls
selling curios to tourists; past the mechanically irrigated fields of the vast dairy estate
owned by descendents of the British colonialist Hugh Cholmondley, the third Baron of
Delamere; on through the gently rolling hillsides of Unilever’s tea plantations; 150 km
past Kisumu, Kenya’s third largest city, on the shores of Lake Victoria; almost as far as
the border with Uganda.
Turn off the tarmac road, with its collection of bars and butcheries, small general stores
painted brightly with advertisements for washing powder, and the usual assortment of
unlikely-looking churches. Follow the dirt tracks, rutted by rains, until they become
paths trodden by foot which a vehicle negotiates only by trimming the vegetation.
Rectangular constructions topped with corrugated metal sheeting give way to circular
dwellings of wood and mud with conical reed-thatched roofs.
Here are the communities in which KORDP works. These are the kind of places
where the only motorised vehicles that come along are the 4x4s of development
organisations; miles from electricity and tarmac, the languid silence is broken only
by the animals. Technology is penetrating slowly: there are bicycles, battery-powered
radios and plastic kitchen utensils; the cast-off clothes of western consumers are worn
until they’re stained and threadbare. But there are few wells – water is carried from the
river – and while pit latrines are spreading, often still the bathroom is the bush.
Ideas also penetrate slowly. Women don’t inherit or own property. Primary schooling
is frequently seen as an option, not a right. On a man’s death, his wives are inherited
by his younger brother. Widows and orphans of an HIV/AIDS victim may be confined to
Stor
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their houses or even killed, lest they spread the “curse”. Usable land lies fallow in the
midst of malnutrition because people don’t know which crops to plant: maize struggles
to grow when there is only a shallow level of topsoil over the rock; but, not knowing
that this is the reason, or that sorghum would flourish in these conditions, the farmers
give up on the land.
When KORDP started working here, as much as three-fifths of the potentially productive
farmland had gone to bush. The problems of agricultural ignorance and conservatism
were exacerbated by the HIV/AIDS pandemic decimating communities and leaving
many of the survivors too old, young or weak to work the land.
The impact of the pandemic is visible at a glance – villages are dominated by the old
and the young. It is 21 years since the first case of HIV/AIDS was diagnosed in Kenya,
and in that time it has orphaned an estimated 1.8 million Kenyan children. KORDP was
registered in 1996, three years before the Kenyan government officially declared AIDS
a national disaster.
“How much do you sell those cabbages for at the market? 300
shillings a bag?”
“250,” Richard admits shyly.
“Have you approached the school to ask if you can supply
them? You know they pay a fixed price of 800 shillings. I think
they would give you special consideration if you explain your
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case. Even their regular suppliers would understand. Why
don’t you talk to them?”
Richard smiles uncertainly.
“I’ll come with you,” Chris Amakobe adds, then, seeing the
diffident look remain on Richard’s face, amends himself without
missing a beat. “So I’ll talk to the headmaster next week.”
Richard is the head of a child-headed household. He was
14 years old when his older brother, who had moved into the
homestead after his parents’ deaths, died. Together with his
younger brother, Richard looks after their two young siblings;
unnerved by the visitors, the children are backed up against
Richard’s legs for reassurance. They live in a rectangular mud
house with metal roofing, built by the deceased older brother, and
have two small circular mud outhouses; a cow, also bequeathed
by the brother, grazes lazily with her calf on the grass next to the
cabbage patch. The cabbages are KORDP’s doing – Richard was
given the seeds and shown how to plant and tend them, with
results that visibly delighted Chris on our arrival.
Having heard our vehicle, children from the next compound
come running to invite us to greet their caregiver. A silver-
haired grandmother welcomes us enthusiastically and fetches
from her house a stretch of white sackcloth which she unfolds
to reveal a pile of small, dried silver fish. She demonstrates
the differently-sized tin cans which she uses to measure out
the fish for her customers in the market – 40 shillings for
that amount, 20 shillings for this. She is responsible for nine
orphans. The youngest – whom, despite her advancing age,
she breast-fed herself – has just begun to walk. As we leave,
Chris remarks with quiet satisfaction on how much more
healthy and vital she looks than the first time he saw her.
Before Chris came to Busia District to work for KORDP two
years ago, he had made his career as an accountant in Nairobi
– first with General Motors, then with a leading trade union.
Now he rides his bicycle around the dirt tracks connecting the
villages of West Bukhayo Location, overseeing the distribution
of World Food Programme food donations and checking up
on the caregivers’ projects. Later today, I will watch him feed
medicine to ailing chickens, check on a new breed of pig he’s
introduced, and advise a budding horticulturalist on how to
find the money for the small-scale irrigation device he wants
for his tomatoes.
“Do you see,” he asks me, “why I prefer this to an office in
the city?”
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The centrepiece of KORDP’s approach is the early childhood development daycare
centre, known simply as “the ECD”. Here a community’s children gather during daytimes
to play, eat a nutritious meal of porridge prepared by volunteer caregivers, and learn
literacy and numeracy and basic lessons about health and hygiene. They are taught by
volunteers from the community who are trained both by KORDP and the government-run
District Centres for Early Childhood Education. KORDP currently has a total of 22 ECDs
in two of the locations in which it works: West Bukhayo Location, Matayos Division,
Busia District, and, 100 km away, Sitikho Location, Webuye Division, Bungoma Dictrict.
Between them they serve 60 villages. KORDP chose these two locations precisely
because they had the worst indicators on its initial baseline study of the province.
Typically, an ECD is purpose-built on land donated by the community. Community
volunteers provide the labour to put up the wood frame and mud walls, and KORDP
contributes the metal sheeting for the roof. The result is a compact but functional room,
big enough for over a hundred children to gather seated on the floor, with alphabets
and numbers and pictures taped to the walls. Some ECDs meet under a tree, or use
a local church, while waiting for a more permanent home. In other places, with help
from donors, the community and KORDP are constructing bigger structures made from
brick.
Food for the children’s morning porridge and lunches is provided, as much as possible,
by the community: at harvest time everyone is asked to give what they can spare, and
it is stored at KORDP’s field office and distributed to the ECDs. But the communities are
not yet fully self-sufficient in food and KORDP also seeks donors – in Busia, it is the
World Food Programme (WFP) – to supplement what the communities can contribute
and ensure that every child has at least a bowl of porridge and a nutritionally balanced
lunch. Aside from the fact that children struggle to learn on an empty stomach, KORDP
found that providing WFP food tripled the attendance at the ECDs: children who would
otherwise have had to work in the fields to feed themselves became able to attend.
When food is provided, at most ECDs every young child in the community attends.
Malnutrition among young children, which had been rife when KORDP started work,
has been practically eradicated.
The ECDs are meant for 3- to 6-year olds, and many are divided into two rooms – one
for the 3- and 4-year olds, another for the 5- and 6-year olds. In practice, children as
young as 2 come along, as well as slightly older ones who are not yet able to cope with
primary education. Although primary education has been free in Kenya since 2003,
children who have never been exposed to a learning environment struggle to adapt.
The basic literacy and numeracy taught in the ECDs enable many village children to
progress through primary school who would otherwise drop out, and the ECDs are
already having a noticeable effect on the performance of the primary schools to which
their childen graduate.
KORDP employs a community nurse, who visits the ECDs regularly to treat straight-
forward ailments – worms, head lice, scabies – and seeks help from specialists for
more difficult cases. This is a service especially valued by the villagers, who typically
live a lengthy trek from the nearest source of medical advice – not worth the trouble if
your condition isn’t serious, not physically possible if it is.
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It is hard to give accurate figures for the number of children at ECDs who have lost
parents to HIV/AIDS: the situation varies from village to village, and children who have
grown up knowing only their caregivers may think of them as parents and misreport.
An estimate, though, is that as many as two-thirds of the young children at the ECDs
have lost at least one parent, with up to half of those having lost both. Because the
communities are poor, and surviving parents may be weakened by HIV/AIDS, even those
children with both parents still alive remain intensely vulnerable.
Members of the ECD committees in Musaka are performing a role-playing skit they learned in psychosocial support training. Several dozen community members are watching, the women seated on benches under the baking sun, the men gathered in the shade of the field’s only tree. In the role-play, a young girl’s parents die, and she is sent to live with a relative where she is treated as a house slave: she prepares the food and is then sent away until the family have eaten, before being allowed back to eat the scraps.
The woman playing the role of the caregiver is a natural actress, and plays to the crowd as she exaggeratedly kicks and beats her neighbour playing the orphaned child, who is on her knees sweeping the floor with an improvised brush of twigs. The audience roars with laughter.
After a tip-off from the local pastor, a community development
motivator from KORDP – played by a blind man, who enters stage
left holding a fellow’s arm for guidance – comes to talk to the
caregiver. “Don’t you see,” he tells them, “children need love and
attention to develop as humans, as well as just food and a roof.
This orphan girl is growing up stunted and traumatised, and
when she becomes an adult the whole community will suffer.”
The skit ends with the caregiver breaking down and repenting
heavenwards: “May God forgive me for what I’ve done.”
Afterwards, I ask Silas Khaoya – KORDP’s community
development motivator in Sitihko – if that ever happens in
reality. Can people really be so receptive to the message? Silas
looks at me with a quiet amusement that says I should attend
more of their training sessions.
“It happens.”
KORDP’s work is distinctive in two ways. The first is the extent to which it recognises
that the most effective way to help orphans is to help their whole communities.
The first thing KORDP does when it starts working in a community is to propose the
establishment of an ECD. The ECD requires seven committees: food security, income-
generating activities, education, shelter and refurbishment, health, HIV/AIDS and
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psychosocial support, and monitoring, evaluation and documentation. Each of these
committees needs seven members, making 49 in total – which effectively involves a
significant chunk of a village’s population.
Having gained the blessing of the chief, KORDP’s community development motivators
explain the model to the people. The best places to reach them are church services
and, with a grimly appropriate practicality, the funerals which the HIV/AIDS pandemic
necessitates at a greater than natural frequency – a burial is one place you can be sure
to find all the community leaders. KORDP gives notice of a meeting and holds elections
to the committee posts, which are often by acclamation as people have discussed their
areas of interest in advance. The chairs of the seven committees together form the
institutional committee, which elects a chairperson from among their number.
The fact that the communities themselves choose the members and leaders of these
committees is central. KORDP has found that a top-down approach, though quicker to
establish, is not as sustainable. The support must be there from the grassroots up.
KORDP then provides the caregivers of orphans and vulnerable children with agricultural
inputs such as seeds and animals, and trains them in how to turn these into both a
source of food security and an income-generating activity, or IGA; it’s easy to forget, in
societies where division of labour has become the norm, that in subsistence farming
communities such as these the idea of learning a trade to earn money is so far from
being accepted normality that it requires a three-letter acronym. KORDP’s employees
can provide basic advice, and are able to call on experts from the Ministry of Agriculture
to provide more specialised training and support in agriculture and livestock.
The community members themselves identify which among them is the most in need
of assistance. The same principle applies to the food KORDP distributes for the World
Food Programme: the community elects a committee who decide on the families most
in need. Everything is done democratically, from the bottom-up; Chris and Augustus
Barasa, who work from the Busia office, are careful to describe themselves not as
“managers” but “facilitators”.
“You know,” Chris tells me, “my aim in this job is to get to a
stage where I can stop riding my bicycle. I want to be able to
sit in my office, secure in the knowledge that people who need
help and advice will come to me.”
He is getting there, but the day is still some way off. The
institutional chairman of the Buyende Khurale ECD – another
Christopher – is the one with the dream of buying a small-scale
irrigation device for his tomatoes, to bring water from the river.
The technology costs around 8000 shillings, or approximately
100 euros. But how to raise it? It is too ambitious a target for
the merry-go-round, the local name for the scheme in which
each member of a group takes it in turn to be the recipient of
a small donation from the others. Chris suggests submitting
a project proposal to the Community Development Fund, a
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government fund which has a certain amount to disburse
each year, and they arrange to meet in the office to fill in the
form together. Before they part, Chris gently but firmly reminds
his namesake that it’s harvest time and he needs to go around
the village chivvying his neighbours into making contributions
to the ECD food supply.
KORDP’s aim is to make itself redundant in the communities
it works with, and move on. Alert to the risk of fostering
dependence, Chris never puts someone on the WFP beneficiary
list twice: they get one set of farm inputs, then they have to
stand on their own feet. Slowly but surely, the communities are
getting there. When more people like Christopher start turning
up at the office to seek help with a project proposal without
the prompt of a visit from Chris on his bicycle, that will be
another important step along the way.
The second way in which KORDP’s work is distinctive is the emphasis it places on
psychosocial support. Like income-generating activity, psychosocial support is a fancy
phrase with a three-letter acronym (PSS) which describes a concept that’s instinctively
familiar – essentially, the idea that when children’s material needs are met, there are still
some other things they require to make life worth living.
In addition to the important but more prosaic training that KORDP offers to the
communities it motivates – in IGAs, agriculture, nutrition, health and hygiene – it
runs workshops for villagers in PSS. These happen in KORDP’s new training centre in
Sitikho Location, a testament to the ingenuity that can conjure a workable structure
of substantial size out of a tight budget: the outer walls and roof are all made from
metal sheets, and makeshift internal walls of black plastic sheeting divide the men’s
and women’s sleeping quarters and the kitchen. Wooden bed frames and mattresses
sit under mosquito nets that hang from wires stretched between the timber frames.
Outside is a sun oven, a new donation, which uses solar power to bake cakes that will
sustain the trainees and also be sold in the local market. The centre can accommodate
up to 30 trainees.
By all accounts the PSS trainings are highly popular and successful. Their aim is to
get people thinking about the issues: how can they create safe and supportive spaces
for children to express themselves, and what happens to children if those spaces don’t
exist? How does a child feel who has a toy to play with but is socially shunned because
she is HIV positive? There are discussions, role-plays and sessions resembling group
therapy in which participants think back over the most difficult times in their lives
and identify the individuals and mechanisms that helped them to cope. The aim is for
trainees to internalise and carry forward the message that young children need not
only a full stomach but a loving touch and a listening ear.
The grief and confusion of orphaned children is often made worse by the euphemisms
of local preachers: at funeral orations, orphans hear that their parents are “only
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sleeping” and will “rise again”. Children at the ECDs have been known to watch dead
flies to see how long it takes them to rise, and demand in frustration to know why it’s
taking their parents so long to wake up. The approach at the ECDs is very different: with
motions of rubbing tears from their eyes, children sing songs about the sadness they
felt when AIDS took their parents. Speaking openly about HIV/AIDS, and thereby eroding
the stigma, is a central aim of PSS.
While we managed to arrive unannounced at homes and
ECDs in West Bukhayo Location, word has spread in Sitikho
Location that there are visitors in the vicinity. The church in
Sitikho village which temporarily houses the ECD is packed with
committee members from this and neighbouring communities.
Shafts of harsh sunlight penetrate the darkness through small
windows in the dark mud walls, which provide cool relief from
the midday sun. After the children have sung songs and the
chairman made introductions, a teacher, Beatrice, gets up
to share her concerns: this ECD needs two blackboards. Can
KORDP buy them? Without chiding her for asking, KORDP’s
director, Kathleen Okatcha, sets about opening her eyes to
other avenues. She works the congregation with the call-and-
response skills of a preacher.
“Your children here,” she says, gesturing around at the small
faces, “are they not children of Kenya?”
“Yes,” comes the murmured response.
“And should Kenya not be grateful that you are teaching her
children literacy?”
“Yes.”
“So you shouldn’t be afraid to deal with the ministry. Talk to
them. Tell them what you need. Isn’t it?”
“Yes!” The responses, tentative at first, become more
emphatic; the sense of empowerment in the room palpably
grows.
“And you also gather together this community,” Kathleen
continues. “Tell them that to teach their children, you need two
blackboards. Let them all make their own small contribution.”
“Yes!”
“And you tell me when to come to the meeting and I’ll make
my own small contribution too.”
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After moving into development from teaching in the mid-1980s, Kathleen worked for
World Vision, Action Aid and HelpAge. It took dedication and persistence for her to
grow KORDP to the stage where it could absorb all her energies: when she first started
seeking funding, in 1996, there was widespread scepticism that the “disease” had
taken hold in Kenyan villages. A Ford Foundation-funded study in 1999 provided her
with the statistics to be taken seriously. From caring for 50 orphans in 2001, KORDP’s
ECDs now cater to nearer 3000.
As you would expect, personal chemistry plays no small part in KORDP’s success.
The other two members of the senior troika, who got to know each other while
working at World Vision, are clear complements to Kathleen’s infectious commitment
and drive. Protus Masibo, the thinker and visionary, is during my visit to the field
nursing a new dairy goat project, striking out windows from plans for the new office
next to the training centre in Sitikho because bricks cost less than glass, and plotting
ways to save rent on the office space in Busia by replicating the low-budget Sitikho
compound there. Joshua Nyaruri, the hard-headed controller of the purse strings,
operates mostly from KORDP’s Nairobi office and squeezes the last ounce out of
Masibo’s ingenuity.
The staff in the Busia office are similarly impressive: Chris and Augustus Barasa
head a team of three strong, no-nonsense women – Mary Kojo, Rose Agala and
Geraldine Amusala – PSS facilitator, community development motivator and nurse
respectively, each one of them broadly experienced and more than capable of setting
up a project in a new district when new funds arrive. If anything, the job achieved
by Silas in Sitikho Location is even more impressive: assisted only by a community
nurse, Roselyne Barasa, in less than two years he has roused twelve institutional ECD
committees whose commitment is evident in the size of the crowds that greet us as
we travel around the scheduled stops, and in the disappointment of those who have
walked from outlying villages to ask that we add their ECD to the itinerary.
One of the most encouraging aspects of KORDP’s community-centred approach
is that it flushes out talented people who clearly have the ability to step in and fill
roles in the organisation when opportunities for expansion come along. While there
are many in the villages who – like Richard with his cabbages, Christoper with his
tomatoes and Beatrice with her blackboards – need a boost to their self-confidence,
there are others who are born leaders. At the first ECD we visit in Sitikho Location,
the institutional chairman hops on the back of the pickup to travel with us; when
I’m called on to give speeches, he’s the first on his feet to translate into Bukusu, the
local dialect, and by the end of the day he’s practically chairing the meetings; after
every stop he seems to collect more passengers for the back of the pickup, so we’re
transporting quite a crowd by the time we arrive at the training centre to check on
the cakes coming out of the sun oven and the progress of the new office building.
KORDP is not well-known outside of the communities in which it works, because the
profile of an NGO in provincial towns tends to be directly related to the location of its
office and the frequency with which its vehicles cruise the main road; KORDP’s Busia
office is discreetly down a side street, and its staff do most of their work by bike. But
within the communities, regard for it is high. The chiefs of neighbouring villages who
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want KORDP in their communities far outweigh the available resources; villagers want
to come to training sessions on agriculture and livestock even if KORDP doesn’t have
the ability to give all of them the startup seeds or animals.
The regard in which KORDP is held is demonstrated by its supportive relationships
with the local government: the District Centres for Early Childhood Education train its
teachers, the Ministry of Agriculture trains its caregivers, and KORDP’s input on cross-
cutting issues is sought at the quarterly District Development Committee meetings. It is
also evidenced by the World Food Programme trusting KORDP to handle its distribution
in Busia, and by the list of donors: as well as the Bernard van Leer Foundation and WFP,
KORDP has received financial support from the American Jewish World Service, UNICEF,
the Regional Psychosocial Support Initiative (REPSSI), the Embassy of France, Peace Child
International, Rotary Club International, Lutheran World Relief, the National AIDS Control
Council and others. Its approach has also been commended by the World Bank.
KORDP’s approach shows every sign of being replicable. Through an umbrella
organisation called Orphans Development Programme International, it has sister
organisations in Uganda, Tanzania and DR Congo. A community that borders West
Bukhayo, Busibwayo, has even set up its own ECDs without waiting for KORDP’s arrival:
having seen that the children from the next villages were healthier, happier and doing
better in school, they organised themselves and within the space of a fortnight had
established three ECDs catering to over 200 children.
There is still much to be done. Sitikho Location, with its 35 villages and 22,000
inhabitants, represents roughly half of KORDP’s current ECDs. It is one of four locations
in Webuye Division; which is one of seven divisions in Bungoma District; there are
four districts in Western Province, and eight provinces in Kenya.
Mang’ana village, Sitikho Location: the back of the pickup
is laden with travellers from earlier ECDs, and we are faced
with another impressive turnout: the best part of a hundred
people have congregated at next to no notice and with no
explicit request, doubling the number of children in the field.
Rumbling clouds are gathering overhead, and the meeting is
outdoors because this is a new location and the ECD is not
yet finished: the timber frame is up, awaiting the mud and
the metal roofing. The institutional chairman, resplendent in
jacket and tie, tells us the volunteer labourers are ready and
the children will be inside by next week.
He gestures to the plot of land on which the structure is
being raised – two acres of it – and asks an old man to stand
up and join him. The old man’s name is Tawai Sirengo; he has
nine orphaned grandchildren. He shuffles over gingerly; he
has a tufty white beard, his bald scalp is stretched tightly over
his skull, his eyes rheumy with cataracts. The chairman tells us
that the old man has donated these two acres of land to the
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ECD. As he takes his neighbours’ applause, Kathleen darts out
of her chair and envelops him in a hug.
It is not a unique story. A large new brick structure is going
up to house Munongo ECD in West Bukhayo location, Busia
district, also on land donated by a white-bearded grandfather,
Paul Ouma. What especially excites this man is not the new pig
or chickens that KORDP have given to the neediest caregivers
in the community, but that they have found the funds to dig
a well, so the children will no longer have to trek through the
marshes to the river to carry water. There are crocodiles there;
they killed his wife.
In villages typically consisting of several hundred people, there is scarcely a villager
whose extended family does not include a potential beneficiary of an ECD. The
Bernard van Leer Foundation supports KORDP because its approach of strengthening
communities works well for young children made vulnerable by the HIV/AIDS pandemic.
But you could equally turn it round and say that KORDP imaginatively uses young
children as an entry point to revitalise communities. Thinking about the future of its
children challenges a community to bring out the best in itself.
These communities are like the land with shallow topsoil that farmers give up on
when it won’t grow maize: as HIV/AIDS has caused traditional ways of life to crumble,
communities have also become run down through lack of ideas, knowledge, organisation
and self-belief. Planting an ECD unleashes the potential of communities, just as planting
sorghum does for the soil.
The Bernard van Leer Foundation
The Bernard van Leer Foundation <www.bernardvanleer.org> aims to enhance opportunities for children growing up in circumstances of social and economic disadvantage. It concentrates on children 0-8 years.
The Oscar van Leer Award
The Oscar van Leer Award was instituted in 1994 and is presented every two years. It honours programmes ‘for excellence in enabling parents and communities to help young children realise their full potential’.
The recipient of the Oscar van Leer Award 2005
Kenya Orphans Rural Development Programme (KORDP) <www.kordp.org> strengthens the ability of families and communities to care for orphans and vulnerable children. Working in areas of Kenya’s Western province worst affected by the HIV/AIDS pandemic, it helps rural communities to set up early childhood development day care centres. These provide young children with nutritious meals, opportunities for social and psychological development, and preschool learning without which many would not go on to primary school. KORDP trains caregivers in health, nutrition, improving food security and establishing income-generating activites. While it provides essential inputs, mobilising and empowering communities is the key to KORDP’s success.
Copyright © 2005 by the Bernard van Leer Foundation, The Netherlands.
The Bernard van Leer Foundation encourages the fair use of this material. Proper citation is requested. All rights reserved on the images.
All photos by Wendy Stone, freelance photographer based in Kenya. In the photo opposite his introduction, Peter Laugharn, Executive Director, is pictured visiting KORDP in July 2005.
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Eisenhowerlaan 156, 2517 KP The Hague, The NetherlandsP.O. Box 82334, 2508 EH The Hague, The Netherlands Tel: +31 (0)70 331 22 00, Fax: +31 (0)70 350 23 73Email: [email protected] Web: www.bernardvanleer.org
Eisenhowerlaan 156, 2517 KP The Hague, The NetherlandsP.O. Box 82334, 2508 EH The Hague, The Netherlands
Tel: +31 (0)70 331 22 00, Fax: +31 (0)70 350 23 73Email: [email protected] Web: www.bernardvanleer.org