Nakonde, Zambia

A Nakonde rural health centre.

HIV/AIDS
Community understanding about HIV/AIDS is relatively high. People acknowledge the visible effects the pandemic is having in the community - an increase in the number of orphans, widows and widowers, reduced production capacity and lower income levels.

HIV/AIDS has now been integrated into the school curriculum as an education issue and Anti-AIDS clubs exist, both in the community and in schools.
Nakonde ADP will continue to work closely with local government and civic agencies to help train community based health workers and strengthen their structures for increased awareness, care and advocacy.

In collaboration with the Ministry of Education, it is planned that over the next 12 months an extra two teachers from each of 15 schools in Nakonde ADP will learn how to teach children about HIV/AIDS.

Nutrition
About 75 percent of households in the Nakonde ADP area do not produce enough food to last through the next harvest season. In lean times, members of these households largely meet their food needs through exchanging labour for food, reducing the number of meals per day and depending on less nutritious cassava meals.

Cassava roots can be prepared much like potatoes, for example boiled, baked or fried. Fresh roots contain about 30 percent starch and little protein, although the plant’s young leaves are high in protein and can be prepared like spinach. However, cassava is not widely grown in Nakonde.

World Vision carried out a nutritional survey of children under five in conjunction with the Ministry of Health. The survey was held in two of Nakonde ADP’s six zones and found that approximately 69 percent of children in this age group were undernourished, confirming the fact that many children do not get a balanced diet.

Among other proposals the ADP is currently working on for the coming financial year (October 2003-September 2004) are those seeking to boost agricultural production and improve nutrition.

Training
The ADP held two training sessions for community health workers. The first was for Neighbourhood Health Committees from 22 health posts. Topics included malaria, safe motherhood, sanitation and how to use a development planning tool called PLA*, which helps people assess local skills and resources.

The second workshop was for peer educators from 10 schools. Peer educators are responsible for raising awareness of HIV/AIDS and other social dangers amongst fellow pupils.Topics discussed included communication and counselling skills, physiology, sexually transmitted diseases, teenage pregnancy and drug abuse.

* PLA - Participatory Learning and Action
Also known as PRA (Participatory Rural Appraisal), PLA is a development-planning tool formed in the early 1990s. Through a series of PLA exercises, facilitators such as World Vision help a community assess their needs and find solutions.

From a properly completed PLA exercise, people can discover how much they really do know, what resources and skills they already have, and how resourceful they have been in the past. They can assess and analyse what has or hasn’t worked in terms of community survival and growth. Discovering what they know is an empowering experience for people who, probably for many generations, have felt downtrodden and without value. From this self-knowledge, goals can be set that build on capacities and reduce vulnerabilities.

This method is in contrast to development practice of the 1980s, when people were more passive sources of information and the facilitator tended to be the one who did most of the learning.