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Returning Power to the Family: Learning Self-Reliance in Zimbabwe
Text and photos by Penny Cohen
Several years ago, Alexander Chisango noticed that although his wife Analyn worked at public relations for the Zimbabwe Post and Telecommunications Corp., her passion was her ability to turn plain fabric into ornate bedspreads, tablecloths and curtains. Sensing that she had potential to capitalize on a very profitable talent, Chisango urged her to market her wares.
Analyn Chisango with some of her handiwork
Soon she was operating out of a small showroom in town, employing nine workers at above-minimum-wage earnings. Within several years, her work improved, her business grew, and her income raised the quality of
life for her entire family. Analyn had capitalized on a skill that not only tapped a passion, but empowered her family.
This concept – empowering families to solve their own problems – is very powerful in Zimbabwe where the economy is deteriorating, there is a devalued currency, foreign currency shortages, and rising inflation and unemployment. Many families struggle to buy food, foot their medical bills and pay for transportation since fuel prices skyrocketed recently. Government assistance has virtually dried up, and help is not forthcoming from the private or business sectors, Chisango said.
While there are "ideal" families in Zimbabwe where a mother and father co-exist happily with their children, there are many other families that live under very adverse conditions. Deaths from AIDS have created single-parent families. Some children orphaned by AIDS are raised by grandparents, while others may be left to fend for themselves. Some mothers are deserted by their mates, or choose not to marry. Families that emigrate from rural village to the city often lose connections with their extended kin.
The family, Chisango argues, must learn to pick up where the government has left off, taking leadership in difficult times, and crafting its own solutions – with men and women sustaining equal footing in the household. It is time to recognize the strengths of the family to manage a wide range of activities, from contributing to a family business to coping with single parenthood.
Chisango embraces this concept, and not just for his own home – he urges the entire country to adopt it. It is at the heart of his Christian-based organization, the Pan-African Family Empowerment Foundation.
The foundation is a grassroots socio-economic movement that helps families in Zimbabwe move away from a culture of dependence. It trains family counselors, helps families start income-generating projects, conducts research and extensive networking, and lobbies the government for better family policies.
This movement toward reliance on the family has grown stronger in the wake of the IMF-World Bank's economic structural adjustment program in the 1990s, which attempted to address the country's post-independence surge in consumption, leading to unemployment and devalued incomes, said Rekopantswe Mate, a University of Zimbabwe lecturer on the sociology of the family and development studies. The idea was to offer very little government assistance in social and economic development, while encouraging private donors to play a leading role, Mate says. Families were in need, and the government could not help. Housing, which city councils had been primarily responsible for providing in the past, became unaffordable to the people.
Tough Times Ahead
The country emerged from a dependent mentality after years of receiving government handouts, Chisango said. He now hopes to help families achieve financial independence by teaching the skills needed for income-generating projects, gardening, shoemaking, weaving and screen-printing. He also teaches hygiene and household sanitation to help keep medical expenses down.
But will it work?
"Where families are involved in some entrepreneurial activities, yes, it is possible," Mate says. "But we also have to understand these entrepreneurial activities are buoyed by the prevailing economic situation," she adds, referring to the country's crumbling economy. As far as I can see it, we're heading for big trouble."
Chisango has his work cut out for him.
After receiving a bachelor's degree in education, Chisango, age 39, worked as Zimbabwe's Assistant National Literacy Coordinator. He also worked extensively in nongovernmental organizations, training and educating
people to work in agricultural, bakery, poultry and cattle cooperatives nationwide. It was during this time that he discovered a missing link in development work: development policies are implemented on a national level, but are never applied to family units.
"I noticed that while we talk about individual development, we also talk about community development, and then national development," he said. "From there, people talk about regional and international development. But I discovered that approach was different from the reality in people's minds.
"For example, when I was dealing with groups of men and women working together as a producer cooperative, many of those collective producer cooperatives were failing. They were failing financially, they were not making a profit and many of them were even failing socially and organizationally. Quite often, there were being surpassed by businesses that were run by small traders."
If a member of a cooperative falls sick, for example, production falters when nobody arrives to take the worker's place. But in a family trading business, an absent person can be replaced with a relative whose financial well-being also is dependent on the success of the business. Small trading businesses have a sense of intimacy, while cooperatives breed harmful competition, he said.
Development, Family Style
The problem, he concluded, was that Western development ideas were being imposed on African families. Most donor organizations, such as the World Bank and United Nations, are Western entities with abstract policies. Their policies assumed that people were communities of individuals, not clusters of families.
For example, they might try to jump start a Third World economy by pumping money into the production sector, such as multi-national business corporations, instead of funding family businesses. Chisango tries to compensate for this oversight by redirecting funds back to the family.
In African societies, the individual must answer to the family, a standard that contrasts with Western societies, where it is not unusual for people to live alone, or even stay a far distance from the family. Programs which ignore this principle are resisted because they are seen as trying to tear the family apart, Chisango says.
For example, a female fighting for women's liberation must be able to explain to her husband and children how her personal emancipation will aide the family's need for food and sustenance. "As long as what is spoken out about in a workshop of women does not take the politics of the home into consideration, it just hits the wall and ends there," he noted.
Alex and Analyn Chisango with their youngest son
People are "concerned about themselves, their families and their households, first and foremost – before you talk about the community, and before you talk about the nation," he said. "If you decide you want to take up a profession – to become a policewoman or a soldier – your family – father and mother, brothers and sisters – all have something to say about what you've decided to do."
"In Western society, the individual is very powerful," he adds. "You can influence the government or parliament through the Internet and email. But here, information technology has not reached that level. There are only very few individuals who can make a difference as individuals. Some individuals who want to make a difference can be hindered by their families, because the family will say, 'Why do you want to create trouble for us?'"
With this philosophy in mind, Chisango set out to create a way for families to become self-sufficient. He began contacting churches, using religion to reach a country that is 85 percent Christian.
Building a Volunteer Movement
He also reached out to urban resident associations, factory workers, and women's and youth groups, telling them about pertinent programs, available funds and other professional help. He began mobilizing volunteers, and calling family counselors to guide families with child rearing, coping with single parenthood, and starting income-generating projects.
Chisango began with six trained volunteers to cover social empowerment areas like financial, marital and gender issues. As the demand for counseling grew, he began training volunteers as counselors, selecting those who had demonstrated successful coping strategies, like a mother who had become a manager.
Most of his volunteers are recruited from mobilization and awareness meetings, where Chisango or one of his colleagues gives a speech and then explains the qualities that the foundation seeks in volunteers. Those who meet the criteria are trained.
The training is an ongoing national effort that expands independently of the foundation, so it is difficult to know the exact number of participants, but Chisango estimates some 4,000 people are direct participants, and the foundation has impacted as many as 12,000 people altogether.
During the counseling sessions, surveys are distributed to ascertain families' employment, skills, education, occupation and entrepreneurial history. Counselors help them reflect on their abilities and achievements, and discuss their mistakes and triumphs.
Alex and Analyn Chisango and their children
"This helps every participant discover the potential that is already within the family," he said. Chisango tracks the success of his participants by reviewing these surveys.
Chisango eases into situations carefully, knowing that he risks distancing a family member if he does not respond carefully to anger or denial. His counselors know, for example, that a child who has been molested by a relative may be very resistant to embracing the idea of any family at all.
In these situations, the counselors themselves can become the target of anger. If feelings are not handled appropriately during an intervention, a child may never be open to the idea of learning to be part of a family when it prepares to have a child of its own.
The foundation began lobbying churches, lawmakers and organizations to adopt its policy at its 1998 Pan-African Family Empowerment Foundation Conference. It has asked the government to adopt United Nations family principles, a goal that has not yet been realized.
Pan-African Family Empowerment Foundation Conference held in Harare in 1998
The foundation also has unsuccessfully attempted to influence the government's land resettlement program, a controversial and violent venture that redistributes white-owned land to the black majority. The foundation wants to ensure the interests of families are considered and that successful land transfers are documented to benefit new settlers.
For some Zimbabwean families, selling food they grow on a small plot of land can mean survival. But if they are not trained to farm, or are unable to delegate farming responsibilities within their family, the venture can fail.
While the foundation focuses on empowering existing families, it also tries to act as a family support network for those without families, such as refugees, orphans, homeless people and victims of natural disasters. It has mobilized churches to provide food and clothing to victims of the floods that recently hit Zimbabwe.
Taking Power Back to the Family
As the foundation expands its efforts to influence policy on a national level, Chisango continues to work at the community level. Recently, he stood before a small group of parents at a private, middle-class high school in Harare, where the thrust of the discussion focused on the need to get more parents involved in their children's education.
He used the opportunity to talk about his ideas of family empowerment, urging parents to be open with their children. "It's primarily your responsibility, before we even come to the teacher at the school," he told them.
It's important to keep children involved in the affairs of the family, so that they can contribute to its survival, or even carry on if the parents die, Chisango told them. He noted that some children find themselves alone with no money for school fees when their parents die unexpectedly, and relatives descend on the family inheritance.
"They deserve to know what is happening," he said. "They deserve to know some of the difficulties you are encountering as a parent. Unless we are willing to be involved in the lives of our children, we can't guide them."
Paurwithe Alves, whose 16-year-old son attends the school, reviewed her notes after the meeting, which she had attended with her husband. "Like he said, make time and listen to them," she said, referring to her children. "We've got to teach them to be responsible, and I think that's something I'm going to work on."
The impact of the project is beginning to spread. For example, some 15 churches nationwide, and several churches in South Africa, have set up their own family empowerment counsels, serving congregations ranging in size from 50 to 500 people, Chisango said.
These churches are learning to network with other agencies. For example, when an unemployed widow with six children sought the help of a church counselor, she was referred to a social agency that gave her funds for school fees. Two of her children are now educated and employed, and they contribute to their mother's income.
"People are taking back power into their families, and beginning to to do advocacy for themselves – beginning to speak out for themselves," Chisango said. "That's part of the joy."
Chisango speaks at a Pan-African Family Empowerment Foundation Conference held in Harare in 1998
Since AIDS has become widespread, hospitals have been overwhelmed with patients while experiencing shortages in medication. Families, who at first were reluctant to care for HIV-infected relatives, have since adopted a system of family-based care. They act as caretakers for their sick relative by encouraging them eat a healthy diet.
Chisango believes his foundation contributed to this change in attitude, one which keeps health care costs down and provides a support system for the patient. "More and more people are beginning to realize that you can use the family as an empowerment resource center for gender issues, employment creation, rehabilitation and victims of abuse," he said. "There's no longer a public outcry of hopelessness."
In the future, Chisango would like to begin research and services to improve disaster prevention and rehabilitation programs for victims of natural disasters and political violence. Most important, he would like to document the stories of people who have survived such situations.
"Nobody has systematically gone to those people to say, 'What do you suggest? You have struggled with these things and you have recovered. What lessons have you learned?'"
Chisango would like to document a wider range of successful case studies, compiling them in easy-to-read booklets in simple English or indigenous languages.
Since Chisango received his last Ashoka stipend two years ago, the foundation has survived on private contributions from individuals. He has a core group of 12 volunteers who keep the foundation going, whose backgrounds range from a successful mother with a communications degree, to a prayer healer who focuses on prayer for family problems.
Orchestrating a Worldwide Song
Chisango's vision for the future includes adding several full-time employees to handle some of the foundation's priority tasks. These tasks include supervising the training, documenting case studies, and organizing fundraising. He would also like to add a staff person with a communications background to handle advocacy and networking, lobbying by email, and producing a newsletter, service announcements for free media slots, and a Web site.
Five years from now, Chisango envisions a network of family empowerment branches spreading across the African continent, a goal he believes is achievable through churches. Each of those branches would have networks within a country, and would become powerful lobbying bodies to amend country constitutions. In ten years, he hopes the majority of families will be self-sufficient and that his foundation's mission will become a "worldwide song."
The ideas of family empowerment were engrained in Chisango during his childhood, when he grew up in a peasant family in southeastern Zimbabwe. His mother taught him how a family of very little means can empower itself to care for children.
Chisango's father died when he was 16 years old, leaving his mother to eke out a living for him and his younger brother, two of the eight children who still remained under her care. He watched her toil in the fields from sunrise to sunset. She would often give him words of encouragement, imparting her ideas of honesty and hard work.
Chisango recalls a recent visit to her in the countryside.
"She is still there, and I was reminding her of where I am now, because of her words."
She almost cried with joy, he says.
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