Give 200 orphans in Zimbabwe access to education

This quarter we are happy to report the success story of Anisha and her grandmother and caregiver, Chelya. Anisha was born in South Africa and was brought to Zimbabwe by her mother, Samantha, upon her return when Anisha was six months old. However, due to Samantha’s chronic illness and inability to meet registration requirements, Anisha was an undocumented citizen and subsequently excluded from education. 

Chelya attempted to resolve the issue by approaching the Registrar General’s Office several times. However, her attempts were unsuccessful. In South Africa, Samantha used a pseudo-name to access maternal health. This meant that when Chelya tried to register Anisha, she could not prove that Samantha was her mother; it was Samantha’s pseudo-name that appeared on the health card, appearing that various essential registration documents did not match. 

After many unsuccessful attempts, Chelya approached the Trinity Project. Owing to the strong stakeholder relationship between the organisation and the Registrar General’s Office, Trinity Project successfully lobbied for the registration of the Anisha in line with the National Constitution of Zimbabwe (2013), the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of Children and United Nations Convention on the Right of the Child. As a result, Anisha managed to obtain a birth certificate represented by her grandmother instead. Anisha is now a registered Zimbabwean citizen and is enrolled in school. This also enables Anisha to access her various socio-economic rights associated with health and justice.

Anisha’s case represents the many children who are at risk of having their future compromised and being trapped in the vicious poverty cycle that will increase their risk of sexual exploitation, child trafficking, sexually transmitted diseases, teenage pregnancies, child marriages and more. Without access to identity documents, children are not visible in the eyes of the state and remain on the peripheries of official society. It means not being part of the national population register, disabling the state from providing adequate services like education and social services. They face challenges that those with access to identity documents will never face. The Trinity Project continues to work to protect and empower these vulnerable individuals. 

Alongside other business: This quarter saw us focus on the strategic elements of our work on birth registration. 

Trinity project being a major stakeholder in access to documentation, we were approached to lead community mobilisation and to present before the panel of commissioners the challenges they face in trying to assist clients. The organisation managed to partner with Zimbabwe Human Rights Commission on the National Inquiry on access to documentation in Zimbabwe by leading community mobilisation in the provinces of Bulawayo and Umguza. Clients were given a platform to present their testimonies and talk about the  challenges they are facing during birth registration before the ZHRC Commission and also in the presence of the Registrar's officers who are responsible for issuing birth certificates.

After the presentations were made we further recommended that, regular mobile exercises be conducted by the Registrar’s Office and the Registrars themselves to adopt definitions of a 'relative' that is friendly and relevant to our sociocultural background (the laws should be relevant to us). We also recommended that requirements be loosened in order to allow relatives and traditional leaders to register children.

Work at this level is the most sustainable form of delivery and lays the ground for millions of future Zimbabweans to be registered correctly at birth and access their full set of rights.