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| Water treatment and additional latrines have improved sanitation in the village. The neighborhood has also been spruced up
under the watchful eye of Alima Ibraimo, a village 'zone leader.' Stephanie Hanes |
In Africa, lives are improved without handouts
US-based charity Care For Life helps Mozambicans by supporting the goals of community leaders.
from the September 5, 2007 edition
Page 3 of 4
"When I first got here, we used to distribute a lot of stuff," Bueno says. "We used to distribute clothes, food from the World Food Programme.... We've stopped. It's easy to start distributing things. Donors give you dollars, and you buy, and then you give things out. You can invite people to work and help themselves, but you're really sending the opposite message."
The staffers – most of whom are Mozambican – brainstormed and came up with what they called the Family Preservation Program (FPP), an organizational structure that involves a network of households, villages, and field workers all dedicated to goals chosen by the community.
While the staff helps guide community members through this FPP process, after three years in any village, they leave and let locally chosen leaders take over. At no point does the group give food, medical, or monetary aid. At most they offer "rewards" of building materials to families who have met their own goals – repairing their roof, for instance, or planting a vegetable garden.
The staff also discussed how to incorporate literacy and HIV prevention programs into the FPP model. (Care For Life's child-focused HIV curriculum, called Stay Alive, has received both criticism and praise for its abstinence-only approach. The Packards no longer run the organization – they are serving a three-year mission in Mozambique for their church.)
Care For Life started shifting some of its other policies as well. In December 2005, the group stopped distributing World Food Programme food aid to villagers; previously, it had been the WFP contractor for a number of communities. The move angered government officials, many local families, and even some staffers. But Bueno said the organization had become convinced that food distribution as a tool to alleviate poverty was counterproductive – an incentive for villagers to appear poorer.
(There is a longstanding debate about food aid – World Food Programme officials believe that alleviating hunger is necessary to reduce poverty.)
How one village was transformed
The first village Care For Life approached with its Family Preservation Program was Mbatwe, a low-lying village of about 240 families in the flight path of the Beira airport.
Today, a walk through Mbatwe shows a transformed place. Unlike most of the impoverished communities nearby, there is hardly any trash or overgrowth around Mbatwe's small huts. Many of the roofs have been changed from thatch to aluminum. Almost every home has a tarimba – a sort of counter where families can store their cooking pots off the ground – and many have separate kitchen buildings. When Care For Life first started working in the village in 2005, there were only 15 latrines for the entire population. Today there are 119.
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