Wadzanai Katsande Fellowship recipient

Personal background & Motivation
Wadzanai is a 42 years old wife and mother of two, an activist and a firm believer in the power of economic empowerment. Her passion is taking action to ensure that developing countries, Africa in particular, find appropriate and innovative solutions to combat poverty, debt, poor governance and disease. She has a Master of Science Degree in Community Economic Development and formed a NGO in her Father’s memory in 2006 known as the Edmund Garwe Trust (EGT). EGT’s goal is to assist child headed-households to embark on economically viable projects in order to combat the disenfranchisement and disinvestment caused by the scourge of HIV/AIDS while living a rights based life of dignity and self respect. She has recently completed her Masters thesis which was an exploratory study to find out if child-headed households are susceptible to violence and abuse. The research found that child-headed households are subject to abuse and violence and one of the major things they lack is time to think and play and she believes they can do this through sport.

Wadzanai has been a development practitioner for over 19 years living and working with refugees, internally displaced persons and the rural and urban poor. She have amassed a wealth of experience in the management of multi-sectoral projects: team leadership, financial analysis, rights-based approaches to development, women and gender and a multitude of other development-speak initiatives but she has not found the panacea for an orphaned child’s marginalization and lack of coping skills after suffering the pain of parental death and then facing an increasingly hostile world particularly in Zimbabwe’s hyper-inflationary environment. She would like to assist child-headed households in a meaningful and effective way one child at a time.

Situation in country
The political and economic situation in Zimbabwe is incredibly challenging with 80% unemployed and hyper inflation. The UN News Service (2008) indicates that the number of reported cases of children raped in Zimbabwe has surged by more than 40% in the last three years, since 2003. The spread of HIV/AIDS has led to a lot of child-headed households in various parts of the world, especially Southern Africa which is one of the areas hardest hit by the pandemic. The growing number of children left without parents because of HIV/AIDS means that often families cannot cope with more children since they do not have enough money, especially if an adult in that household also died from HIV/AIDS so there is less income all around. Thus the cohesive social fabric of the community/village that used to raise the African child is rapidly disappearing and the children are being left to their own devices with horrendous results.

Fellowship project description & Impact
Wadzanai would like to assist in the formation of girls sporting clubs as safe areas where girl-child heads of households in particular can participate in sport and use the sporting clubs as means of training girls in sport as well as in life-skills development. She would also like to develop areas in which girls and women can gain coaching skills in women’s sports so that they can earn incomes as coaches. The reason for the bias towards the girl child is that boys tend to have time for sport: there are several boy’s football, rugby and other teams but once girls are out of school or the formal educational system there are no girls sporting activities. Girls must look after the family, this is a cultural stereotype. Wadzanai believes strongly in full participation and program direction by the girls themselves. They are helping each other, have several meetings a week at the different girls’ houses. From this space, they form support networks and the basis for imparting social skills and life skills training.

She would like to pilot the program over the period of a year starting with the children who she interviewed and gained relationships with during the time she was doing the study in Marondera, Zimbabwe (a study to determine the prevalence of violence and abuse against child headed households).