Support to Replicable, Innovative, Village/Community-level Efforts (STRIVE) for Orphans and Other Vulnerable Children: End-of-Project Report

This 59-page end-of-project report provides an overview of the "Support To Replicable, Innovative Village/Community-level Efforts" (STRIVE) project, implemented by Catholic Relief Services (CRS) and supported by the United States (US) Agency for International Development (USAID). The report: provides an overview of the project, which included partnership support to 16 organisations in Zimbabwe; details its achievements and impact; discusses operations research findings and lessons learned; and presents insights into the current challenges facing orphans and vulnerable children (OVC). The report suggests that the comprehensive programme of support developed by STRIVE is providing a means through which Zimbabwe can respond to OVC needs in a coordinated and consolidated way. However, there is also room for additional stakeholders to support OVC programming, and more funds are required.

STRIVE believed that community mobilisation was a key success factor in mitigating the impact of HIV and AIDS on children over the long term and that building the capacity of partners would enhance the scale of community initiatives and the number of children they could reach. For this reason, capacity-building was a crosscutting intervention during the first phase of the project. Capacity-building and gender activities included participatory self-assessments, gender audits, and forums for implementing partners to meet and share ideas. Another crosscutting intervention involved a focus on gender. STRIVE recognised that equal participation of men and women is essential for addressing children's issues and that its project activities must respond to the special needs of both girls and boys.

According to the report, STRIVE and its partners reached more than 319,216 children, both directly and indirectly, by the end of the project. STRIVE was the largest project serving OVC in Zimbabwe for most of the project period. Due to the large scope of the project and its explicit operation research mandate, there are numerous examples of how learning from STRIVE has been used to inform other OVC programmes. Most significantly, STRIVE played a leading role in the development, launch, and dissemination of Zimbabwe's National Action Plan for OVC. To promote child participation in the National AIDS Policy (NAP), CRS helped develop a child-friendly version of the plan that was published as an official Ministry document in 2006.

In its final year, STRIVE led 2 initiatives that organisers say have the potential to produce lasting impact in Zimbabwe and beyond. First, building upon efforts by the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) and the Ministry of Education, Sport and Culture, STRIVE piloted a child-friendly schools initiative. Second, STRIVE co-facilitated workshops across Zimbabwe designed to support developing quality standards for OVC programming.

The report describes how Population Council/Horizons collaborated with the Regional Psychosocial Support (PSS) Initiative and STRIVE to pilot a method of assessing the impact of OVC programmes on the psychosocial well-being of vulnerable youth. The study found that ongoing day-to-day stressors represent a serious challenge and that programmes should address children's worry and despair, while cultivating resilience. An important role would be to link youth with trusted and reliable adults with whom they can discuss problems and relationships. Horizons disseminated this research widely through its newsletter, and research suggests it has helped inform national and regional PSS programmes. One change STRIVE made was to begin focusing efforts on community-based PSS that linked children to trusted and reliable adults rather than using off-site "camping" staffed by counsellors the children would likely not see again.

As part of its ongoing effort to disseminate operations research, sound practices, and lessons learned to national OVC stakeholders and international audiences, CRS and its partners presented information at a wide range of conferences and wrote a number of well-received articles. CRS staff members and staff from STRIVE partner organisations documented many sound and promising practices and lessons learned in STRIVE's 4 main intervention areas, as well as in the monitoring, evaluation, and documentation of OVC programmes.

While STRIVE, the Program of Support, and other OVC service providers are making progress in meeting children's needs and reaching underserved areas of Zimbabwe, there remain a number of service gaps, and OVC needs far outstrip the current level of service delivery. STRIVE showed how OVC services can be effectively organised into a package that includes education assistance, PSS, economic strengthening, and food security. They say that this model of addressing the needs of children with a targeted package of services should be continued.