Children in the Wilderness Zambia launched its first programme in October 2007 where we hosted 18 children from a community school in Jifumpa Village located in the North Western Province, just outside of the Kafue National Park. Wilderness Zambia is currently operating 6 camps within the Northern Kafue National Park and faces many challenges as a new operator in this area. We believe that through our Children in the Wilderness Programme we can work towards overcoming some of these challenges – through educating the children, the future custodians of the Park, on key issues such as poaching and conserving the environment. There are many communities surrounding the park and most of our staff working in the camps come from these communities.
Since opening in 2006 we have developed a strong relationship with the people from Jifumpa Village and felt this was a good starting point for our programme. In 2008 we hope to host a further 2 trips in the Kafue National Park and introduce this programme to other communities in the area. We also hope to run a programme in South Luangwa National Park where we currently operate one camp and in 2008 will open a second camp. Our challenges in this area are similar and we hope that through working with the children and the communities we can start seeing some positive changes in the area.
The 18 children who attended our first camp consisted of 9 girls and 9 boys between the ages of 8 and 11 years. With this being our first camp the selection process was done with the assistance of the school headmaster – our critera for this first camp was age (8 – 12 years), only one child per family, no staff children and children who might have lost either one or both parents. We hope next year to be able to go into the villages and schools ourselves and do our own selection of the children with more defined critera.
We ran a very successful 5 day/ 4 night programme for the children at Lufupa Tented Camp – a copy of the programme report is outlined below. The trip had not only a positive and life changing impact on the children, but also on the school Headmaster and accompanying teacher and all the volunteer staff involved. Jikunda Langeni, Headmaster of Jifumpa School
The next phase of our programme is the follow up programme which we hope to put in place by the end of the year. Two of our key staff from Shumba, Idos and Essie, will be going to Botswana in December to do some training with the Children in the Wilderness Botswana team and to join one of their programmes and we plan for Idos and Essie to then spend a full day in Jifumpa School in early 2008 with the group of 18 children.
Children in the Wilderness Zambia has no full time staff at the moment and the programme is headed up by Emma Seaman who is the General Manager of the Zambia Head Office. For more details on CITW Zambia you can contact Emma on citw@wilderness.co.zm
- Read the report back from the first Zambian CITW programme