More than two decades after a hard-won independence, the people of Zimbabwe continue to str uggle against extreme social and economic challenges, and none more so than the three million who live in the western region of the country. With frequent drought and depleted soil, the three provinces of Western Zimbabwe -- Matabeleland North and South and the Midlands -- are the country's poorest. The isolated rural communities of this region suffer disproportionately from severe economic constraints that make it increasingly difficult for the government to provide even basic services to citizens who need them.
In response to these complex circumstances, the hard-pressed but resilient communities of Western Zimbabwe are reviving simple, timetested indigenous traditions of collective action and self-help and applying them in novel ways to forge development solutions appropriate to their needs.
Building on Indigenous Traditions to Empower Rural Communities
What has emerged is the Community Foundation for the Western Region of Zimbabwe (WRF, for "Western Region Foundation") -- a unique, home-grown institution that weds access to the best global practices in community-led development with the time-honored traditions and knowledge of the Zimbabweans it serves. As the first grantmaking community foundation in the country, WRF mobilizes financial resources and technical assistance for local initiatives by serving as a co-financer, broker, and builder of partnerships between communities and the existing development actors in the region -- and beyond.
Established in 1998, the foundation has steadily increased rural villagers' access to resources that did not previously exist in the region. The aim of this support is to help communities bridge the deep cultural, geographic and economic divides that serve to exclude the people of Western Zimbabwe.
"Many rural communities have no access to basic facilities such as water and school infrastructure. As a result, they experience high levels of poverty, HIV/AIDS and unemployment," said Inviolatta Moyo, executive director of WRF. "One fundamental challenge for the foundation is addressing these widespread inequities and their impact on the quality of life of our region."
"The year 2003 was one of the most challenging periods in the history of the country," said Pathisa Nyathi, chairman of WRF's board, who noted that inflation rates exceeding 500 percent during the year threatened the operations of civil society organizations, government and businesses alike. Despite these hardships, "the communities we worked with accepted the challenges and did not give up hope. They got more innovative than ever before," said Nyathi.
The same could be said of the foundation -- its budget has quadrupled in five years, and grantmaking continues in the face of a highly unpredictable economic climate. At the height of the economic crisis in 2003, the foundation managed to award grants to 38 community projects and add three new staff members.
Building on Indigenous Traditions of Self-help
WRF's vitality and the resourcefulness of the communities it serves owe much to the work of the Organisation of Rural Associations for Progress (ORAP), founded in 1981 -- shortly after independence -- to mobilize the thousands of villages in Western Zimbabwe to take charge of their own development. "It became very clear that rural people are underdeveloped because their participation in development thinking, articulation, planning and implementation is not taken seriously," said ORAP founder Sithembiso Nyoni.
"People began to take responsibility for their own development to build alliances and networks from within and across villages. ORAP broke the culture of isolation and silence as great forces for underdevelopment." Nyoni adds that ORAP's strategy involved the revival of the tradition of amalima, a way of pooling community resources, starting with the family unit and progressively working outward into the wider society. In its first ten years, ORAP gained more than a mil lion members and helped rural villages solve their own problems through collaborative efforts in constructing dams, wells and day-care centers; organizing community savings and credit programs and drought relief; and offering technical support to agricultural projects and microenterprises.
Although ORAP was having a positive impact, it faced considerable long-term financial constraints. While exploring ways of creating a sustainable financial base, ORAP and its members saw the possibility of building on a Zimbabwean tradition of collective savings known as qogelela to raise and manage new resources for the benefit of community development.
Mobilizing Broader Partnerships for Community Development
Knowing of Synergos' experience with similar efforts in other countries, ORAP reached out to us. We suggested that ORAP consider mobilizing villages and other key stakeholders into an even broader partnership, along the lines of a community foundation. "Zimbabwe was a pretty divided country, and some thought the idea of a community foundation would bring the country together again. On the other hand, the western region had been so excluded that it was almost as though, until they had their own institution, they weren't going to feel part of the whole," said Peggy Dulany, Synergos founder and board chair.
"Synergos' role was to try to bring diverse stakeholders together for common action. ORAP was already a bridging organization -- linking with communities, collecting dues, and building on important traditions -- otherwise, it would have been nearly impossible to gather in bigger assemblies," said Synergos president Bruce Schearer.
Over the next five years, with Synergos' assistance, ORAP consulted widely with a range of different stakeholders about the role the foundation would play and how it could best be governed and structured. Supported by ORAP, local "mobilizers" traveled to villages and met with groups of people under trees and in community halls to discuss the idea and build support for it. ORAP also networked with community-based development efforts in Zambia, South Africa, Namibia and even Asia.
While saving for the future was a familiar notion to community members, thanks to the qogelela tradition, the concept of a grantmaking foundation was a relatively new one in Zimbabwe and community foundations were virtually unknown, according to Inviolatta Moyo, who had been recruited by ORAP in 1993 as an administrator of ORAP's mobilization effort. ORAP adapted some of the best practices of organizations in other countries and created a uniquely Zimbabwean institution built on local tradition. Drawing on its work in other countries, Synergos facilitated numerous learning and exchange visits between ORAP and community foundations in Mozambique, South Africa and the United States.
Adapting the Community Foundation Model to Local Needs
ORAP shared the results of these visits with its members and other local stakeholders. ORAP's large community board ultimately approved the community foundation model and endorsed the idea that contributors to qogelela would be the new organization's first donors and have seats on its board.
As a result, more than 40,000 community members contributed the equivalent of approximately US $8,000 as seed capital for the endowment of the new Community Foundation for the Western Region of Zimbabwe. "We understood that, on its own, qogelela was not going to constitute a community foundation, that we needed to seek other sources of funding, regionally and internationally, to support development in the region," said Moyo.
The new foundation was set up to be completely independent of ORAP. WRF's founding board constituted itself into working subcommittees that include fundraising and marketing, finance and investment, grants, and staff welfare. The foundation continues to receive and administer contributions to the qogelela fund, matching community resources with support from local, regional and international donors.
Drawing on its longstanding connections to the global philanthropic community, Synergos provided introductions to donors such as the Carnegie Corporation, which provided key funding for planning and start-up. Other major donors include the Ford Foundation, the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa, the McKnight Foundation, W. K. Kellogg Foundation, the Netherlands' Bernard van Leer Foundation, and New Zealand AID.
Although the foundation concentrates on five program areas -- education, HIV/AIDS, women's economic empowerment, youth development, and water and agriculture -- these issues are often intertwined in the small, struggling villages of western Zimbabwe. "Communities come up with a lot of innovative coping mechanisms regarding the social and economic challenges they face," said Moyo. And support in one program area can have wide and unexpected ripple effects throughout and across communities.
HIV/AIDS Care: Forging Innovative Community Solutions
A case in point has been the community's mobilization in response to HIV/AIDS, which is taking an enormous toll on Zimbabwe's economy, health and social vitality. In the face of inadequate or nonexistent healthcare and social ser vices, volunteer home-based care groups have sprung into action in the rural communities of western Zimbabwe to minister to the terminally ill. Increasingly, their caseloads have involved care for the growing number of children orphaned or infected by AIDS. School Development Committees (SDCs), alarmed by the high rates of absenteeism among orphans who could no longer afford school fees, have raised awareness of the impact of AIDS on the community and have sought to create income-generating projects to benefit the orphans and schools.
Activism on the part of the SDCs, key partners in WRF's education grantmaking programs, helped convince the foundation to establish a home-based orphan care program. The foundation has received a planning grant from the Bernard Van Leer Foundation to enable home-based care groups to provide more structured support for AIDS orphans. Meanwhile, home-based care groups are moving beyond home visits, seeking support to establish day-care centers for orphans and income-generating projects to support these activities. Their newest strategy involves advocating with the Ministry of Education to make sure that the needs of AIDS orphans and representation in community school systems.
Transforming Communities Through Partnerships
The long partnership between Synergos and the WRF has provided support and guidance at critical moments and many opportunities for mutual learning. As a Synergos Senior Fellow, Moyo has shared the fruits of her experiences at WRF with numerous other young community-based organizations in Africa and around the globe. "The relationship with Synergos has grown from strength to strength. From the word go, Synergos helped us get a planning grant from the Carnegie Corporation, then start-up funds," said Moyo. "We decided to work together on a more formal basis when we realized that we could benefit from the technical support being continued. Community foundations were a new concept here, and Synergos shared knowledge and provided exposure to similar efforts in Latin America, Asia and the USA."
Looking to the future, WRF is undertaking has requested assistance to undertake a resource mobilization and endowment campaign to be better able to empower communities and respond to their needs over the long term. "In community devel opment, we have learned to accept that there are no barriers, only bridges, if we work with the people and for the people," concluded Board Chairman Pathisa Nyathi. By broadening the definition of community, the foundation is building bridges between rural villages and a range of development resources that can help move western Zimbabwe from exclusion to inclusion.