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Nascent in USAID Cooperative Agreement for Women’s Empowerment Project in Zambia
Nascent Solutions on October 6, 2009, signed a Cooperative Agreement with the United States Agency for International Development USAID/ZAMBIA to implement a women’s economic empowerment project in the Mpika District of Northern Zambia.
The goal of this three-year community-based program is to increase the ability of 12,000 women affected by HIV/AIDS in the Mpika District of Zambia to start and manage economically rewarding businesses.
Zambia has a very high illiteracy rate of 35 percent among its adult population, more than half of whom live in the rural areas. According to Zambia’s Ministry of Education, women comprise about 60 percent of the illiterate adults living in these rural areas. These women are the core of the population excluded from the process of production, and denied the opportunities to participate in social programs that are meant to improve their livelihoods.
This widespread illiteracy has had a severe impact on the lives and livelihoods of the poorest and most vulnerable in Zambia, cascading through all aspects of their lives, their communities and the development of the country itself. It has created a self-perpetuating cycle of disease, poverty and social exclusion that is passed on from one generation to the next.
The HIV epidemic has spread throughout Zambia and its impact has been felt most by the vulnerable - notably young women and girls who become sexually active much earlier than men. At the end of 2006, UNAIDS/WHO estimated that 17% of people aged 15-49 years (about 1 million) were living with HIV or AIDS. Of these 1 million adults, 57% were women, nearly all of them illiterate peasants. AIDS has impacted those in their most productive years, and, as families have disintegrated, thousands have been left destitute. |
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The Target Region
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The Mpika District in the Northern Province of Zambia is situated at the junction of the road to Kasama (the provincial capital), and both a railway station and the highway to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The rural and largely inaccessible district’s main town of Mpika has thus become a magnet for unemployed, uneducated women seeking to escape the drudgery of farm work and make a living from scarce urban jobs. Many drift into prostitution, with the risk of contracting STDs such as HIV/AIDS through interaction with the transient traffic of rail passengers and truck drivers.
The rising number of HIV infections among women and girls is directly related to violence against women and their unequal legal, economic, and social status. Abuses of women’s and girls’ human rights impede their access to HIV/AIDS information and services, including testing and treatment. Those who do obtain HIV services sometimes face disclosure of their confidential HIV test results by public health officials. This heightens women’s risk of being ostracized by their communities and abused by their intimate partners. |
By failing to enact and effectively enforce laws on domestic violence, marital rape, women’s equal property rights, and sexual abuse of girls, and by tolerating customs and traditions that subordinate women, governments are enabling HIV/ AIDS to continue claiming the lives of women and girls.
In Zambia, as in other countries in the region, tens of thousands of girls—many orphaned by AIDS or otherwise without parental care—suffer in silence as the government fails to provide basic protection from sexual assault that would lessen their vulnerability to HIV/AIDS. |
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Sexual assault of girls in Zambia is widespread and complex. A Human Rights Watch report documents several categories of abuse that heighten girls' risk of HIV infection, including sexual assault of girls by family members, particularly the all too common practice of abuse of orphan girls by men who are their guardians, or by others who are charged to assist or look after them, including teachers; abuse of girls, again often orphans, who are heads of households or otherwise desperately poor and have few options other than trading sex for their and their siblings' survival; and abuse of girls who live on the street, because they do not have parental care.
The combined scourges of disease and illiteracy have devastated the lives of the rural poor. Agriculture, from which the vast majority of Zambians make their living, is also affected by AIDS. In particular, the loss of a few workers at the crucial periods of planting and harvesting can significantly reduce the size of the harvest. AIDS is believed to have made a major contribution to the food shortages that hit Zambia in 2002, which were declared a national emergency. Children have also been much affected by the AIDS epidemic. According to UNAIDS and the Ministry of Health, in 2007 there were more than 600,000 AIDS orphans in the country. Thousands of these children are abandoned due to stigma or to simple lack of resources, while others run away because they have been mistreated and abused by foster families.
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The objectives of this project are to enable beneficiaries to develop literacy, numeracy and computing skills, provide skills for them to develop economic independence, raise awareness in the community on the rights of the woman and the prevention of gender based violence and build linkages among the beneficiary groups and promote the sharing of lessons learned.
Nascent Solutions will work in partnership with Pact International, The Elliot School of International Development Studies at George Washington University and several local partners that address the needs of people affected by HIV/AIDS including the Mpika District chapter of the Network of Zambian People Living with HIV/AIDS, NZP+, The Mpika Seed Growers and the Women in Gender Group of the Diocese of Mpika. |
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