What’s happening

“Welcome Mr. Phukaphuka,” I warmly uttered the words as I gently stood up from my seat. I was very pleased that I was finally meeting him. We had been rescheduling our appointments for quite a while now owing to his busy schedule as a policeman cum legal officer. Mr. Aulerious Phukaphuka has been in the police service for over a decade and his resume was rife with a plethora of achievements that he is so proud of – achievements in the child rights field. Among his touted accomplishments is the establishment of a special legal clinic specially dedicated to handling child-related cases ranging from child marriages to defilement and others.

Dzaleka Refugee Camp, home to over 50,000 people from various countries, is served by Dzaleka Health Centre, a small clinic that caters for a combined total of 80,000 people including Malawians from surrounding villages. And the number keeps increasing. Due to the sheer overwhelming numbers of people that the health centre accommodates, the small hospital constantly faces acute shortages of essential drugs. At one point, the health centre ran out of anaesthetics, causing alarm, especially in the maternity section where the drug is critical.

Most of the time, we think about the benefits of vocational training in terms of the monetary rewards when employed. But sometimes, the rewards reaped from going through vocational training go beyond the money and the job. Sometimes, the respect that one earns in society just by owning that vocational training qualification is enough to make someone walk tall and proud. And the high self-esteem that accompanies that confidence tells it all that vocational education is not just about the money. It is so much more. And so much more is what Sella got when she trained in bricklaying in our Vocational Training Programme.

Forditor is a 22 year old Malawian girl who was born in a family of 6 comprising 3 girls and 1 boy. After being selected to pursue secondary school education at Chinkoka CDSS in Madisi, Dowa, Forditor was caught up in the ills of adolescence, like many girls her age. About half of Malawian girls […]

Dzaleka Health Centre is a small hospital that lies at the heart of Dzaleka Refugee Camp located roughly 50 kilometres from Malawi’s capital Lilongwe. According to United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the health centre caters for over 70,000 individuals within and around the refugee camp. The majority of these individuals – 62 percent […]

When the first cases of coronavirus hit the world in China in November last year, nobody was sure what they were looking at. Some thought that this disease, like any other similar ones before it, would pass maybe as quickly as it had appeared. It was not to be. It turns out that COVID-19 was a different type of a previously unknown pandemic and in the next couple of months, after people across Europe and China started dying in multitudes, reality began sinking in. This disease was here to stay.

Elvis was 4 years when his father was murdered through food poisoning. Elvis is from DR Congo. As he explained his story, his face was filled with hurt and pain at the recollection of the events. A few months following his father’s death, a brutal civil war that culminated into a genocide, erupted forcing Elvis, […]

Loveness comes from Zidunge Village in central Malawi. She is 21 years old and has seven siblings, one sister, and six brothers. When you look at her, she is such a sweet tiny girl. But even with the timid demeanour that African girls are socialized to have as they grow up, you can see she has big dreams. She is the secretary of the Network for Youth Development in Agriculture in her village.

When Jupelo got pregnant in 2013 just after writing her final secondary school examinations, she gave up hope of furthering her education. The pregnancy was unplanned and Jupelo’s expectations of a brighter future crumbled to dust, she said. She was only 18. With the baby on the way and her education disrupted, the young woman […]

Back home in DR Congo, Shabani was a popular musician. He was respected and well known in the city he came from. However, all that changed when the civil war broke out and he decided to use music to attack the ethnic conflicts that the war bred. Shabani wrote a song that rubbed the wrong people the wrong way and he soon realized that he had made a dangerous blunder. Powerful people who were not amused by his song started sending him death threats and tracking his moves.

When asked about the profession she would love to pursue, she sat upright, looked utterly confident and gave an answer that is least expected from a 15-year-old girl. Even more pleasantly surprising is that it is a profession that will make her the first woman in the country to hold it and perhaps the second person to have that title.  

Ishimwe, a refugee from Burundi, arrived in Dzaleka Camp in 2007 after being transferred from Luwani Refugee Camp following its closure. Unlike most refugees in Dzaleka, Ishimwe was self-sufficient and never experienced any financial hurdles. She ran a grocery shop in the Camp, which made her enough income to support her family. Ishimwe has a big family of 11 children but she was able to feed them from the money she realized from the shop. When an unfortunate incident left her first-born daughter with a perforated eardrum and a mild physical disability, Ishimwe’s financial status started crashing down.