Imagine an October morning in Chirundu, at the height of Zambia’s hot season. By the time an 11-year-old child begins the walk to school, the sun is already beating heavily against the earth, and the ground beneath their bare feet has become almost unbearable. They want to go to school. The classroom is there, the teacher is waiting, and Zambia’s free education policy means that school fees are no longer standing between them and an education. However, somewhere along that journey, the heat becomes too much. Their feet hurt and they slow down, turn around and go home. Perhaps they try the following morning again; perhaps, after enough mornings like this, staying home becomes easier than enduring the journey.
This is one of the realities confronting some children at Katwezele Community School in Chirundu. It is also a reminder that while free education has opened doors, removing school fees does not automatically remove every barrier standing between a child from a vulnerable household and the classroom. There are still books to be bought, pencils to write with, clothes to wear and, sometimes, shoes simply to make the journey to school possible. It is against this backdrop that Zango Foundation has mobilised 2,500 pairs of shoes, alongside 1,000 pencil cases and 600 T-shirts. The organisation is demonstrating what can happen when a local civil society organisation is allowed not merely to implement activities, but to grow.
Before the shoes
Led by Senika Banda, Zango Foundation is a local civil society organisation founded in 2023 working in Chirundu and Lusaka across climate change, education, health and Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH). Children sit at the heart of much of its work, although the organisation also supports women, young people and other vulnerable groups. This breadth reflects the realities it encounters in communities, where challenges rarely fit neatly into sectors. Education can be affected by poverty; health can be shaped by nutrition; and climate change can affect agriculture, income and ultimately the wellbeing of families.
Like many emerging local organisations, Zango had passion, ideas and proximity to communities without necessarily having all the institutional resources needed to translate that commitment into sustainable growth. The organisation depended largely on volunteers and did not have dedicated staff. While implementing activities in Chirundu, it also lacked an office from which it could consistently coordinate its work and meet local partners. “Zango was doing the work, but there were clear gaps between what the organisation wanted to achieve and the institutional capacity available to achieve it,” Senika explained.
About a year ago, Zango began receiving support from the Zambian Governance Foundation (ZGF) through the Civil Society Strengthening Fund (CSSF). The significance of that support was not simply that another project had been funded; it created room for Zango to address some of the organisational gaps that had constrained its work. Zango could provide stipends to volunteers who had previously carried much of the work without consistent financial support and participate in capacity-strengthening opportunities in areas such as community and resource mobilisation. Peer-learning spaces and engagements with other actors also increased its visibility, widened its networks and strengthened its engagement with institutions including the Ministry of Community Development and Social Services.
When strengthening creates possibilities
One of the most interesting things about institutional strengthening is that some of its most important results are difficult to count. A training may last a day, but the knowledge or connection developed there can continue producing results long afterwards. A conversation can become an introduction, an introduction can become a relationship, and a relationship can eventually unlock an opportunity that did not exist when the original project was designed. Capacity is therefore not only about what an organisation knows, but what that knowledge, confidence and access enable it to do for itself.
For Zango, some of those possibilities emerged through peer-learning and engagement spaces, where it connected with a donor who would eventually provide the shoes for children at Katwezele Community School. Senika’s network has since stretched even further. During a trip to Thailand, she developed a relationship with a partner from Hong Kong who has sent agricultural equipment and materials for schools, which are being shipped to Zambia. These developments represent something beyond the original CSSF support: an organisation increasingly able to tell its own story, build its own relationships and mobilise additional resources around priorities emerging from the communities it serves.
That is an important shift. Strengthening local civil society cannot simply mean helping organisations become better at applying for the next grant. It should also mean strengthening their ability to navigate a wider ecosystem of communities, government, businesses, funders and fellow civil society organisations.
Growth beyond the organisation
That growth is increasingly visible across Zango’s work. In partnership with Mtendere Hospital, the organisation has established an adolescent hub focusing on sexual and reproductive health, while creating space to engage young people on climate change and sustainable agriculture. The initiative partly emerged from recognising nutritional challenges affecting some young pregnant girls and understanding that nutrition, health, agriculture and livelihoods cannot always be treated as separate issues.
For young women, Zango has established a centre equipped with ten sewing machines, creating an opportunity to develop practical livelihood skills. Its first cohort of 30 young women is preparing to graduate, while it is working with the Ministry to identify participants for the second cohort. There is growth in the fields too: Zango has recorded its first harvest of watermelons, sorghum, maize and cucumbers. It also continues supporting older people’s homes with materials and responding to other needs within communities.
Taken separately, these interventions may appear to belong to very different sectors. Seen together, however, they reveal one advantage of locally rooted organisations: proximity allows them to see how people’s challenges intersect. The child without shoes, the young woman seeking a livelihood, the adolescent needing health information and the household struggling with food security are not project categories. They are members of communities whose lives cannot always be divided according to programme headings.
Back to Katwezele
At Katwezele Community School, the shoes are more than a donation. They are evidence of what becomes possible when local organisations have the relationships, confidence and capacity to mobilise support around the priorities of their communities. They are a reminder that development succeeds not only because resources exist, but because there are trusted local actors able to connect those resources to real needs.
If we want more children in classrooms, more young women accessing livelihoods, more households strengthening their food security and more communities building resilience, then we must invest in the organisations already working alongside them. The journey from institutional strengthening to community impact is not always visible, but it is real. Sometimes it looks like a partnership. Sometimes it looks like a harvest. And sometimes, under the scorching October sun of Chirundu, it looks like a child who no longer has to choose between an education and the pain of walking barefoot to school.
The next step is ours: to continue backing local organisations with the resources, trust and opportunities they need to turn community challenges into community-led solutions.
To learn more about Zango Foundation and its work, contact Senika Banda chetasenika@gmail.com or follow the organisation's community initiatives in Chirundu and Lusaka on Zango Foundation — Let's Make a Better World.
