Community Enrichment

INVESTMENT IN OUR STUDENTS’ COMMUNITIES

Here at ZimUzo, we understand the importance of community and its role in the development of our students. We developed our three programs with this philosophy in mind: that if we directly invest in our schools, we indirectly invest in our students; if we directly invest in our students, we indirectly invest in our communities; and, if we directly invest in our communities, we indirectly invest in our schools. The cycle continues like so.

A fundamental value of ZimUzo is education. Education does not just have to come through a classroom, which is why we are pursuing education through community enrichment as well. One of ZimUzo’s community projects involves the launching of public health initiatives and COVID-19 campaigns in rural communities of Nigeria and Pakistan. Through our public health initiatives, we seek to target water-borne illnesses that often wreak havoc in rural communities, such as cholera and typhoid, and also reduce ignorance about basic measures to protect individual health. We are looking into affordable ways to reduce infant mortality in these villages through the usage of oral rehydration therapy (ORT) and drone delivery of drugs. We are also supplying blood pressure devices to rural community clinics in Nigeria and Pakistan as we jumpstart these initiatives. As part of our COVID-19 education campaign, ZimUzo is donating 500 masks to rural communities in the aforementioned countries.

ZimUzo is also highly invested in supporting village widows. Oftentimes, impoverished village children come from homes where the father is deceased or simply not present. Widows may have a difficult time raising their families, an issue compounded by the lack of adequate education. To combat this problem, ZimUzo provides seed money and microloans to widows to start businesses, and empowers them by providing them with the means to acquire education or economic means to support themselves and their families. Knowledge is power; therefore, in equipping our widows with the means wherewith they can obtain an education that is not limited to our community health education initiatives, we believe that we can revitalize communities not only through functional education but through health and sustainability education as well.

As with education, we at ZimUzo understand the importance of social determinants of health and its role in the development of our students. It is often said that it takes a village to raise a child. What happens if the village raising the child is defunct or woefully ill-equipped to raise the child? The child suffers, not just academically, but psychologically and physically. But, if that village is stable and well-equipped to raise the child, that child can thrive.