On this page, I have put the reports which I have issued to supporters and friends every years since I started working in Zambia. I started initially volunteering with Habitat for Humanity in providing homes for widows and vulnerable children. Quite quickly, I began to understand that even in a nice, new Habitat home, a widow will still be poor and vulnerable and so, together with my good friend, Voster Tembo, I started looking for solutions. Together, we established the Zambian Development Support Foundation and our first initiative was in providing micro-finance loans to widows, to empower them to start their own business, and thereby to escape poverty.
Over the years, our direct poverty work has developed to include other forms of business support such as workshops on book keeping and financial skills. We have gone further with vocational training, and mentoring start up businesses and an Enterprise Centre for start up businesses and a Farm Block. All of this activity is intended to assist the poorest and most vulnerable members of society to become financially independent and to escape poverty.
Catherine Daka of Graceland School told me that if I could only do one thing for Zambia, to help solve all its problems, it would be to bring literacy to Zambia. I was inspired by Catherine and I realised that she was right. After initial small efforts to bring books to Zambia, we have ended up bringing forty-foot shipping containers loaded with tons of books to Zambia. These books have been distributed widely to schools in the area. The delivery of the books themselves has been supplemented by teacher-training workshops in literacy and in the teaching of reading and writing to support the teachers who now work with those books, and also the foundation of libraries. We also have provided laptops and established computer labs and given lessons in computer skills, to ensure that our literacy programme in Zambia includes computer literacy as well as book literacy.
The following yearly reports of my work in Zambia, which were issued at the end of each year’s work, tell the story of how all of this has come about, starting at the beginning and bringing us up to today. Please feel free to browse and learn more.
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