| 11/06/2010 Dedication, success, & recession: AFSA partner organisation Woza Moya featured in KZN newspaper The Witness |
Dedication, success, & recession: AFSA partner organisation Woza Moya featured in KZN newspaper The Witness
One of AFSA’s partner organisations, Woza Moya, featured in Stephen Coan’s article ‘Hill of Hope’ in KZN newspaper The Witness on May 21, 2010. The article was published as Woza Moya celebrated its tenth year of service to the people of Ofafa, a rural community near Ixopo in KZN. The article heralded the success of Woza Moya in alleviating the impact of HIV and AIDS on people within its communities and was well deserved publicity for the organisation. However, it also revealed the grim reality that, thanks to the global economic recession, Woza Moya is facing a funding crisis which is hampering the organisation’s efforts and has already closed down essential feeding programmes.
Woza Moya is a non-governmental organisation (NGO) that provides quality care and support for people infected and affected by HIV and AIDS. Intervention programmes offer services such as home-based care, interventions for orphaned and vulnerable children, HIV and AIDS information and counselling, basic medical care, food security programmes including emergency food parcels and food gardens, as well as paralegal services to link communities with government support.
In 2008/9 Woza Moya serviced over 8000 people from the rural Ofafa Valley, a resource poor area afflicted by high levels poverty and where lack of infrastructure sees people walking long distances for essentials such as water and firewood. The illiteracy level is fairly high in adult populations, and unemployment sits at just under 85%. The latest statistics available for the area, from 2003, reported that 47% of women who attended antenatal clinics tested HIV positive. Of the general patients referred for voluntary counselling and testing in a five month period in 2003, 78% tested positive.
AFSA has supported Woza Moya in many facets since the organisation’s inception and remains its principal donor; in 2009, AFSA provided Woza Moya with a funding grant worth R494, 181. More than financial support, AFSA provides significant and vital capacity building to Woza Moya in the form of conferences and skills building workshops and trainings which has helped Woza Moya to build a strong foundation of committed and highly skilled staff.
Woza Moya’s School Sponsorship Programme has been one of its most successful ventures. While there is a great need for education within the community, children were not attending school due to the stigma and teasing they experienced because they did not have a uniform. Woza Moya identified this need and responded by providing uniforms, school books and equipment; this has evolved into the sponsorship programme where for R1 000 a year, individuals can, through Woza Moya, buy a child a full school uniform and help keep school retention rates high, crucial to one day ending the cycle of poverty and pandemic that plagues the communities.
However the article raised the serious issue of the funding crisis currently being felt across the development sector, impacting even successful, well established organisations such as AFSA and our partner organisation, Woza Moya. The sting of the global recession is still being felt across the world and has led to real cuts in foreign aid and development aid budgets. Development organisations such as Woza Moya, wholly dependent on these funds, have been hit especially hard. Initially, essential feeding programmes were scaled back; now, food parcels have been stopped altogether, leaving already vulnerable groups such as child-headed households in a desperate situation. Other programmes are also suffering and being curtailed due to funding shortfalls.
Yet the need is still great: numbers of people infected and affected by HIV and AIDS are ever-increasing, and Woza Moya expresses a strong desire to extend its programmes and services to as many beneficiaries as possible.
Please click here to read Stephen Coan’s article ‘Hill of Hope’ printed in The Witness May 21, 2010
Check out the website: www.wozamoya.org.za
Sources
Woza Moya Annual Report 2008-2009, available online at:
http://www.wozamoya.org.za/Woza%20Moya%20Annual%20Report%202008-2009%20PDF.pdf
Stephen Coan, ‘Hills of Hope’, The Witness, 21 May 2010. Also available online, at: http://www.witness.co.za/index.php?showcontent&global[_id]=41061 |
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