Chipulukusu, Zambia 2022

Over the past few years I have become quite invested in long term community-based projects which I hope will help to bring people permanently out of poverty in Chipulukusu, a slum of 65,000 souls, just on the outskirt of Ndola, Zambia. With no electricity or water supplies, sewage system, refuse collection or proper streets, is one of the poorest and most deprived places on the planet. Here, life expectancy hovers around 38 years and it is estimated that one person in eight is HIV positive. Orphans make up over 10% of the population and unemployment is almost universal. This is a place which deserves a hand up.

These initiatives that I have been involved in included a micro-finance project to help widows to start up small businesses, supplying books to schools, establishing computer labs in schools and refurbishing school buildings, and we have delivered to Chipulukusu three 40 foot long steel shipping containers full of books, with a fourth container almost full in Ireland, waiting to be filled and shipped out.

From a standing start of a few years ago, when there were no books available at all, in any school near Chipulukusu, and no bookshops and no libraries for hundreds of miles, literacy has now taken root in Chipulukusu. School exam grades have dramatically improved. Two of the shipping containers have themselves been turned into use as community libraries and are very much in demand and have approximately 100 children attending the library every day. The hunger for education is phenomenal.

Many schools in Chipulukusu will not benefit from these containers of books, as they simply do not have the facilities to hold them. Far too many schools simply do not have a secure roof, windows or doors, sufficient to hold books, or almost anything else. For those schools, exposed to the elements and with no resources, we have been struggling to support them with the facility of borrowing books from our established public library in Chipulukusu. The reality however is that our small library is simply not well-enough stocked or organised to support all of those schools. For those schools, we are hoping to greatly increase the stock of books in the public container library in Chipulukusu. We are also setting up now a formal partnership, so that each school which does receive books will agree to share those books on a lending basis with one other school which does not have the capacity to hold books itself. In this way, even the poorest of schools will have some limited access to books and we are hoping that the pairing of schools will bring long-term benefits for both.

The almost-permanent solution to providing books and teaching materials to schools which do not have the physical structure to hold them is to build a proper, purpose-built library of large enough dimensions to hold a large stock of books, and sufficient to allow the students to attend and to read there. There has been a lot to do along the way, but we have now almost reached the point where we can begin to see construction in the next few months.

Everyone agrees that education and opportunity are the way out of poverty. In August 2022, I will be going out to Zambia with a small team of volunteers to personally work in Chipulukusu. In collaboration with the local schools of Youngnak and Graceland we are hoping to carry out a teacher-training seminar to make better use of the books and resources already out there, and we will be working further on the micro-finance initiative which will include training on financial literacy and basic business skills for our entrepreneurs. We also want to expand our work with the computer labs and the existing container libraries.

We are going to live in Chipulukusu, in the same huts and with the same facilities as everyone else. That means no electricity, running water, showers, toilets, beds or furniture during our time in Chipulukusu. We will cook over an open fire, sleep on the floor, and live with the community with whom we work.

Financial Support

I would be very grateful if you can contribute in any way at all. All help is most welcome and very badly needed.

I assure you that none of the money which I am seeking is for the cost of my own visit to Zambia as I will pay my own air fares and costs. All money which you contribute will go straight to this project.

I will of course let you know how I get on in Zambia when I get back.