Interview with charity worker in Southern Africa

interview with Fortune Thembo, Family Strengthening (FSP) Advisor for SOS Regional Office South Africa (covering Angola, Lesotho, Namibia, South Africa and Swaziland)

Brenda: We're here with Fortune Thembo, SOS Family Strengthening Programmes Advisor for Southern Africa. Fortune, before you tell us about the pilot projects in Sekhukhune and Mathanjana, what are Family Strengthening Programmes?

Fortune Thembo: Family Strengthening Programmes, Brenda, are programmes that are targeted at vulnerable families that have got orphans and other vulnerable children. When we do family strengthening, we basically are targeting three areas: Access to essential services; improving childcare knowledge and skills; as well as economic strengthening. What we do is we work with families who are struggling to meet those three areas in their lives and so we assess the need in each family and then we actually provide them access to essential services, we provide them with either skills or the ability to care for their children and we get them engaged in economic empowerment programmes like income generating activities or livelihood projects.

Brenda: Ok, where are Sekhukhune and Mathanjana?

Fortune Thembo: We'll start with Sekhukhune; Sekhukhune is in the greater Groblersdal municipality; this is about 260kms from Johannesburg. It's in one of what are called presidential nodal areas. These are areas that we identified in South Africa as areas that are very much deprived compared too many others. That means there is a lack of services, generally comparatively, there is difficulties with a lot of prevalence with HIV/AIDS, unemployment and so on. So you find that's also how we identified this area as an area of great need with many orphans who are vulnerable compared to many other areas.

Mathanjana is in Dr JS Moroko municipality. This is about 160kms or so from Johannesburg, just outside Pretoria.

Brenda: Ok, great, what makes the projects in Sekhukhune and Mathanjana unique?

Fortune Thembo: These two programmes, there is a third one as well, but generally there are three of them that are unique in the sense that most of our programmes have been operating within the community around villages, which means the village has been a springboard for reaching out to the communities around where we are working as SOS (Children), but with these three, they're actually located in a place where we don't have a village. So we have actually gone into a community and gone on to prevent child abandonment where we have identified the need for family strengthening. So they are very unique in the sense that, you know, they are pioneering an approach where we are basically going into a community where we haven't been programming for long-term family-based care and we are identifying this location based on national statistics, vulnerability, as I mentioned earlier on with the presidential nodule area in Sekhukhune, and that's what makes them unique. So in that sense, they are programme entities in their own right with a manager, with their own systems, and not necessarily relying on the village systems.

How many children are being helped through these two social centres?

Fortune Thembo: Through the two social centres we are reaching a total of about 741 children as of June 2008, and these children are in about 202 families in both areas.

Brenda: Can you give me an example of how has a family been helped by this programme in any one of those areas?

Fortune Thembo: As I mentioned (before), one of the key challenges in these areas is the impact of HIV and AIDS on families. Now in Sekhukhune there is a family where a single parent passed away due to HIV/AIDS and left children living in a shack which was too close to a river that flows through Sekhukhune and there was really (the) danger that these children one day could be swept away by heavy rains. And their shelter was really very precarious and they were not going regularly to school. It was basically a child-headed household because the elder child had taken over parenting that family. So what our programme did was we identified, obviously, the shelter as an area of need, access to school, which is access to essential services, and we also wanted to make sure that those children can access basic things like access to nutrition. And also, we linked them with local authorities who provide what are called RDP houses so then they were put into that system so they can be able to access better shelter. In the meantime what we did was we made sure that they moved away from that area which was dangerous for them. They moved to another stand temporarily and we made sure that the shelter that they were using was a bit more secure and then the children were able to live a much better life than they were living before. So, hopefully, in the near future they'll be able to access that RDP house when their turn comes in the queue.

Brenda: That's very interesting, Fortune, thank you very much for your time, it's been a great pleasure chatting to you.

Fortune Thembo: You're welcome.

SOS Children has projects in Angola, Lesotho, Namibia, South Africa and Swaziland together with other countries in Africa to support children who have been affected by HIV/AIDS.