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Background briefing: STARS Impact Awards recipients
Stars Impact Awards
November 22, 2007

Category: Health Award
Recipient: Island Hospice
Location: Harare, Zimbabwe
Established: 1979
Contact: Dr Dickson Chifamba
E-mail: island@africaonline.co.zw
Tel: +263 470 1676

As HIV/Aids increases in Zimbabwe, children are becoming the sole carers for dying parents. Left to cope without the usual recourse of an extended family, which is becoming increasingly scarce in the country, children as young as nine are nursing their dying parents, many themselves facing the knowledge that they are infected and will die alone.

Island Hospice is the first organisation in Africa that provides palliative care and support to people with terminal illness, their families and carers, and offers a comprehensive therapeutic service for the bereaved. The organisation has evolved to address a growing reality in Zimbabwe, that of child carers.

Island Hospice, which provides most of its primary services to people in their own homes, recognises that the majority of these young carers are not equipped with the necessary knowledge and skills to care for the terminally ill. Working with the children individually and in groups, Island Hospice equips them with the practical skills they need to provide care effectively, but also focuses on the children's emotional needs as they face the isolation and stigma associated with their position, their bereavement and, in some cases, the knowledge of their own illness.

How will the STARS Impact Award positively affect Island Hospice?

With the additional funding available through the STARS Impact Award, Island Hospice plans to increase the counselling services available to these young carers by extending them into three new paediatric clinics in Chitungwiza, Mabvuku and Epworth, reaching approximately 140 children per month. It will also extend a successful pilot project into these clinics which provides non anti-retroviral medications to children, to combat opportunistic infections and rashes. These palliative drugs are in short supply and expensive in Zimbabwe, leaving children untreated.

Category: Education Award
Recipient: Students Partnership Worldwide (SPW) Tanzania
Location: Iringa, Tanzania
Established: 1992
Contact: Craig Ferla
E-mail: director@spwtz.org
Tel: +255 26 270 3422

As in most other parts of the world, it is the young who are most at risk from poverty, HIV/Aids and other sexually transmitted diseases in Tanzania. As a result of this, the young are not perceived as part of a solution, rather that they are part of the problem. There are few examples of young people taking a proactive role in addressing the challenges they face.

SPW Tanzania's approach is different. Its goal is to ensure that young people make responsible choices concerning their sexual reproductive health and have a lead role in the decision-making processes that affect their lives and their communities. It operates on the conviction that young people are simultaneously the most affected by poverty-related issues and the most essential to achieving change. All its work is led by young people through a youth-led volunteer model which enables it to deliver full-time holistic sexual reproductive health programmes in the most remote rural communities.

The programmes reach as many as 75,000 young people each year through volunteer peer educators who have been placed in rural schools. The majority of these peer educators are Tanzanian form 6 leavers, who conduct a range of youth empowerment activities in and out of schools. Working in these remote communities for up to seven months, they provide sexual reproductive health education and life skills training. The programmes are delivered for an annual cost of only US$9 per child and many of the volunteers go on to university and gainful employment as a result of their experience.

SPW Tanzania's programmes are developed, assessed and continually refined based on broad consultation with tens of thousands of rural youth, key adults within their communities, partner NGOs and government ministry partners.

How will the STARS Impact Award positively affect SPW?

Over the last eight years, SPW Tanzania's work has focused mainly on the regions of Mbeya and Iringa in the Southern Highlands of Tanzania where need has been greatest. The STARS Impact Award will enable the organisation to expand its programme further in the Mbeya region and into the Ruvuma region as well.

Category: Protection Award
Recipient: RAPCAN (Resources Aimed at the Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect)
Location: Cape Town, South Africa
Contact: Cheryl Frank
E-mail: info@rapcan.org.za
Tel: +27 21 712 2330

In a country which faces serious challenges in combating child abuse, RAPCAN focuses on the prevention of child abuse and neglect and the promotion of children's rights. It works at a local, provincial and national level in South Africa and in the southern African region.

In 2001 RAPCAN established a new programme to support child witnesses. The programme provides services to child victims of sexual offences testifying in court proceedings. The service is based in the courts and is designed to reduce the levels of trauma experienced by children giving evidence. This includes ensuring that children are properly fed, that they are prepared for testimony in court and that they receive therapeutic follow-up services. It also goes beyond this by ensuring that the room in which the child is received is clean and calming, that court officials are trained and understand the needs of children and that further harm to the child is prevented by including family members in the scheme.

RAPCAN makes extensive use of trained lay counsellors to provide direct services under the supervision of qualified social workers. Over 6,800 children benefited from these services in 2006 across six court sites around Cape Town.

In order to act as a resource to other organisations, and increase access to and quality of services, RAPCAN has developed the Child Witness Support Toolkit to enable other organisations to establish similar services elsewhere. The toolkit comprises training materials, a procedures manual, a costing instrument and minimum standards guidelines. The organisations are also provided with training and technical support from RAPCAN.

In response to a significant shortage of trained professionals in dealing with child sexual abuse, RAPCAN has also developed the Healers Package to enable non-professionals to take sexually abused children through a therapeutic process of healing.

How will the STARS Impact Award positively affect RAPCAN?

The STARS Impact Award will enable RAPCAN to continue its delivery of prevention and management services for children as well as enabling the organisation to improve its work generally through sustainability and capacity building.

For further information about the STARS Foundation and Impact Awards please visit www.starsfoundation.org.uk

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