By Dennis Gaboury | Founder, Chair, Board of Trustees
A recent story in a Zimbabwean newspaper declared that the national formal economy is collapsing. In response, the country’s leading economist disagreed, arguing that it could be more aptly described as just in intensive care. Government owes $10 billion, long overdue, to foreign lenders. Most projections suggest that the economy will grow 1.2 percent this year, hardly enough to create jobs for the 80+ percent of the adult population already unemployed, not to mention the 300,000 school leavers who look for a foot in the economy annually. With businesses closing and government unable to hire anyone since it can no longer pay its salary bill, even university graduates have resorted to selling used clothes at the markets.
The situation is particularly precarious for our under-educated girls who have little hope. They become the easy prey of older men who offer them money or gifts – only to wind up pregnant and abandoned.
Providing our girls with meaningful skills – personal and vocational – to avoid this trap is one of our most constant struggles. Increasingly, we are turning to skills usually considered male in Zimbabwe since they provide the greatest flexibility for small business. Teenage girls are perfectly comfortable serving their male relatives, as expected by their elders. The pressure to conform is enormous. So it takes some doing to stimulate their interest, but we’re getting there. Teenage rebellion is not at all the cultural norm.
One group of our girls just finished all the elements (poles and hoops) of a basketball court that we just installed at the rural school the children in our outreach program attend. Marvelous, a school leaver, ASKED to be sent to a course in electrical wiring, and she’s already halfway through. And when we revamped our kitchen, Lynn requested instruction in tiling, mortoring and the sawing the plywood underlayment of our countertops.
The brightest light on the horizon is the negotiations we’re in with a local motorcycle manufacturing start-up company that sought us out as partners because of our vocational training program in welding and a funder interested in businesses involved in such partnerships. If all goes well, our girls will weld and build component parts for supply to the plant and, over time, be hired at the plant itself. FINGERS CROSSED!!!
And we’re working hard to ensure that our littlest boys and girls are nudged beyond the gender roles to which they are trained and home and in the community. Even at tender ages, too many of the boys think that their sisters need to wash their dishes. But not at Zimkids! In between lunch and nap time they line up for computer training beginning at age 3!
We just wanted to end with a shout out to the wonderful ZSA ZSA Team from the Rotary Club in Knoxville, which recently visited the Center. In collaboration with the Books for Africa Foundation, they’d sent us dozens of boxes of books, and they arrived just in time to see our staff catalogue and shelve that contribution. Read about their visit at http://www.zsazsagroup.com/2015/02/
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