Pic: Patrick Sikana (PS), CARE’s country director for Zimbabwe. Credit: Almot Maqolo
CARE International in Zimbabwe celebrated its 30th anniversary on the 25th of August 2022 at Rainbow Towers, under the theme "Celebrating three decades of fighting poverty and empowering women and girls in Zimbabwe." Patrick Sikana (PS), CARE’s country director for Zimbabwe, recently sat down with our reporter Almot Maqolo (AM) to share a bit about the initiatives that have been undertaken, prospects for development, and what it's like to work in an agro-based country. This is part one of our interview.
AM: How is CARE represented in Zimbabwe?
PS: I am the representative of Care International in Zimbabwe. I hold the power of attorney, which means the backstops are with me. However, we have also decentralized our representation authority to two heads of sub-offices, one in Masvingo and one in Manicaland. So those heads of sub-offices represent CARE on the ground in those two provinces. We have district coordinators in each of the 10 districts where we work. That is our representation structure in Zimbabwe.
AM: What projects are being implemented that you are involved in?
PS: We have a number of projects that revolve around six impact areas. What I should explain first is that what we do is we deploy solutions, but we use projects for us to implement our solutions. So let me talk about the solutions. From saving lives and transforming livelihoods, we have about six solutions that we implement. Humanitarian response as an emergency, gender equality and education, systems strengthening because we believe that sometimes you have to help the system respond rather than just target the individuals. We have resilience building, which is a center piece of our work. We have organizational development and we have a piece that we are sort of building up around good governance. So the projects that we use to drive these solutions are several. We have Takunda Project, which is supported by the United States Agency for International Development, aiming at building the resilience of small-scale farmers, building their productive assets, income, and food security, building their resilience and making sure that nutrition is a central part of that intervention. So that is in our food, nutrition and water interventions, and then we have a number of other projects that are meant to build resilience. So we have been supported by the Zimbabwe Resilience Building Fund. In the Midlands, Mberengwa, Zvishavane and Masvingo. So we have those projects coming to an end. We also have a number of educational interventions to help girls transition. Children in Buhera and Mutare progress through various levels of education until they complete them. We have cash transfer projects that help parents so that they can support the girls in their transition. We also have a project around building the capacity of civil protection structures to be prepared for emergencies and to respond to emergencies. So we have a cross section of interventions, but these projects come and go. What remains with us are the solutions.
AM: Which are your main priorities for 2022–23?
PS: Our current strategic plan stretches up to 2025. So our priorities right now are food, water and nutrition. We are working with the government and other partners to ensure that we are building enough capacity to generate enough food and nutrition. Sometimes the focus is just on food but not on nutrition. So we want to make sure that food, water and nutrition are a priority as well. Climate change and adaptation are another priority. Gender, which means the inclusion of men and women in the interventions that we are responding to, focusing on women and girls. Gender and education are other priorities. So those are our top three priorities and then our second tier priorities are humanitarian response and women's economic inclusion, which means how do we create entrepreneurship opportunities for women but also how do we help to respond when an emergency hits? We are trying to build our capacity in health, which is our top priority. So those are the three main tiers we have.
AM: What patterns and difficulties do you observe in terms of aid and development for Africa?
PS: One is localization. It means that most of the funding that is available for development aid is channeled towards more local and less international organizations. There is a desire to localize development, with the hope that the more local the intervention, the more grounded it will be, and thus the more sustainable it will be. However, the downside of that trend is that the more you focus on localization, the more you sacrifice numbers or scale, and it just doesn't have to be either or. We have functional partnerships between local organizations and big NGOs. As a result, the local organization can assist with sustainability, while the larger organizations can assist with breadth and scale. The second trend focuses on big bets. There is a related trend, which is the third trend. I want to speak about these two in conjunction with each other. There is both donor fatigue, which is donors getting tired that they are pumping money and they are not getting the sort of results that they are looking for because they
are putting money into small projects. But there is also community fatigue. Most of these communities have been well researched. They have memorised the responses that they want to give to NGOs or to aid workers. So the idea is to go for big ideas, big things and not small projects that are time-bound. It also reduces the need to transact with the communities repeatedly because the communities have been thoroughly researched. The last trend currently is the real shifting of resources from areas that are seen as peaceful more towards countries that are conflict affected. So you have your Ethiopians, Somalias, and Ukraine taking the lion's share of resources. We are going to see the impact of this in 2-3 years from
now. We have underinvested now because resources from big aid sources have gone elsewhere. So I would say that these are some of the big trends that any serious NGO has to be tracking: what is happening in the conflict world, what is happening in the donor community and also donors' wanting to come more as a consortium. What is happening with the localization agenda? What does it really mean to localize? Does it mean to have local people or does it mean to act locally but be globally connected, which is our stance as Care that it is okay to localize as long as you are connected to other sources of influence, resources, and people.
AM: How can projects for climate smart agriculture be better coordinated and collaborated across industries?
PS: I think we have to create platforms for different actors to talk because that's the only way we are going to understand the needs. I will show you, I will give you an example in social media. The way Facebook or WhatsApp have been improving is by understanding what the customer needs. The more privacy features the customer needs, the more the providers of these platforms begin to build features such as messages that can disappear after some time because they have understood the feedback. I think they have to be a platform that generates reliable evidence about what is needed but also a platform that brings the key actors together: the private sector, the businesses, donors, governments, NGOs, and the communities themselves. For me, that is a starting point. It's the evidence generation but also the platform to share that information and that evidence. I think once we do that, we will be closer to finding a solution. One of those solutions that I am glad to mention is, for instance, the resilience building platform that the United Nations is pushing and which we as Care are really happy to participate in and provide our experience. That is a promising platform. I hope that it will not just end up being a platform for the like-minded. We need a platform that goes beyond just aid organizations; we need profit-making organizations and the private sector to sit on that platform. We need government voice on that platform, and community voice. So it's a win-win situation that we are paying attention to the interests of government, communities, and the private sector and we are harmonising that as we churn out resilience building.
AM: What is the most interesting CARE project that we have in Zimbabwe and why?
PS: I think all the projects that we are actually implementing are very interesting, but I will give you the Takunda project as an example. We are implementing it in Manicalanda and Masvingo. The reason Takunda project is interesting is the long term. So you have enough time to try, fail and try until you break through. It is not a short-term project that is suffering from being under pressure. The second oneis that it has sufficient resources with $55 million for the next five years. The third is that it is a partnership. It is not only Care implementing, we have other partners that have come to the table, which means the strength of the idea or our ability to implement is drawing on the diversity that we have on the table. Diversity is never a weakness; it's a strength because we bring different perspectives to the table. I think it promises to have a huge impact because of its size, both in terms of duration and resources that we are deploying.
AM: Any final words you would like to share?
PS: I really think that, first of all, Zimbabwe is a country where poverty can be eradicated. The potential to eradicate poverty is with us. I will keep repeating this: we have human capital and there is no underestimating what we can do and what you cannot do with such a widely educated population. I think we need to tap into this population by stimulating a lot of opportunities for young women and girls to be engaged in productive ventures. We need to look at the structure of urban poverty because it is growing, especially after the impact of COVID-19 and begin to prioritize urban space as a vulnerable space because of too many young people that are unable to find employment. I think it is surmountable. I think the vision of not leaving anyone behind is achievable, but we need to get our priorities right and
we have to all start thinking big, putting our resources where they will make the biggest difference.