Oscar van Leer Award 2005 by Bernard van Leer Foundation

The Oscar van Leer Award 2005

The Oscar van Leer Award 2005 for excellence in enabling parents and communities to help young children realise their full potential

Everyone knows that the HIV/AIDS pandemic is cutting down young adults in their prime. But the world too rarely thinks of the children of those young adults. Robbed of their parents, they must fall back on communities which themselves have been debilitated by the loss of their most productive generation. The Bernard van Leer Foundation works with partner organisations which take a community-based approach to supporting HIV/AIDS orphans and vulnerable children. Our partners explore ways to build the capacity of neighbours and extended families to raise orphans and to support caregivers who cannot cope on their own. support in the development of these young children. We are midway through a series of four international workshops on psychosocial support, bringing together experts and practitioners from child-focused organisations. This issue should be high on the agenda at the International AIDS Conference in Toronto in 2006. Kenya Orphans Rural Development Programme (KORDP) is an exemplar of both the community-based approach and psychosocial support. What does this mean in practice? We sent writer Andrew Wright and photographer Wendy Stone to document the work KORDP does on the ground in rural communities in Western Kenya. Their depictions of KORDPâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s activities occupy the pages that follow. UNAIDS, the joint United Nations programme on HIV/AIDS, estimates that by 2010 the

disease will have left more than 20 million sub-Saharan African children without at least one of their parents. In celebrating KORDPâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work, we point to one hopeful example of how we can help those children to cope.

Peter Laugharn, Executive Director, Bernard van Leer Foundation November 2005

Oscar van Leer Award 2005

Through the projects we fund, we also stress the importance of psychosocial

Doctors have died, Teachers have died.

Take care, mummy. Take care, daddy. I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t want to be left alone. â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Song sung by children in Yalusi early childhood development centre, Bungoma District, Kenya

Oscar van Leer Award 2005

Mummy, daddy, do you know AIDS?

selling curios to tourists; past the mechanically irrigated ﬁelds of the vast dairy estate owned by descendents of the British colonialist Hugh Cholmondley, the third Baron of Delamere; on through the gently rolling hillsides of Unilever’s tea plantations; 150 km past Kisumu, Kenya’s third largest city, on the shores of Lake Victoria; almost as far as the border with Uganda. Turn off the tarmac road, with its collection of bars and butcheries, small general stores painted brightly with advertisements for washing powder, and the usual assortment of unlikely-looking churches. Follow the dirt tracks, rutted by rains, until they become paths trodden by foot which a vehicle negotiates only by trimming the vegetation. Rectangular constructions topped with corrugated metal sheeting give way to circular dwellings of wood and mud with conical reed-thatched roofs. Here are the communities in which KORDP works. These are the kind of places where the only motorised vehicles that come along are the 4x4s of development organisations; miles from electricity and tarmac, the languid silence is broken only by the animals. Technology is penetrating slowly: there are bicycles, battery-powered radios and plastic kitchen utensils; the cast-off clothes of western consumers are worn until they’re stained and threadbare. But there are few wells – water is carried from the river – and while pit latrines are spreading, often still the bathroom is the bush. Ideas also penetrate slowly. Women don’t inherit or own property. Primary schooling is frequently seen as an option, not a right. On a man’s death, his wives are inherited by his younger brother. Widows and orphans of an HIV/AIDS victim may be conﬁned to

Oscar van Leer Award 2005

Story by Andrew Wright

Eight hours from Nairobi: across the Great Rift Valley, with its roadside stalls

their houses or even killed, lest they spread the “curse”. Usable land lies fallow in the midst of malnutrition because people don’t know which crops to plant: maize struggles to grow when there is only a shallow level of topsoil over the rock; but, not knowing that this is the reason, or that sorghum would flourish in these conditions, the farmers give up on the land. When KORDP started working here, as much as three-fifths of the potentially productive farmland had gone to bush. The problems of agricultural ignorance and conservatism were exacerbated by the HIV/AIDS pandemic decimating communities and leaving many of the survivors too old, young or weak to work the land. The impact of the pandemic is visible at a glance – villages are dominated by the old and the young. It is 21 years since the first case of HIV/AIDS was diagnosed in Kenya, and in that time it has orphaned an estimated 1.8 million Kenyan children. KORDP was registered in 1996, three years before the Kenyan government officially declared AIDS a national disaster.

“How much do you sell those cabbages for at the market? 300 shillings a bag?” “250,” Richard admits shyly. “Have you approached the school to ask if you can supply them? You know they pay a ﬁxed price of 800 shillings. I think they would give you special consideration if you explain your

case. Even their regular suppliers would understand. Why don’t you talk to them?” Richard smiles uncertainly. “I’ll come with you,” Chris Amakobe adds, then, seeing the difﬁdent look remain on Richard’s face, amends himself without missing a beat. “So I’ll talk to the headmaster next week.” Richard is the head of a child-headed household. He was homestead after his parents’ deaths, died. Together with his younger brother, Richard looks after their two young siblings; unnerved by the visitors, the children are backed up against Richard’s legs for reassurance. They live in a rectangular mud house with metal rooﬁng, built by the deceased older brother, and have two small circular mud outhouses; a cow, also bequeathed by the brother, grazes lazily with her calf on the grass next to the cabbage patch. The cabbages are KORDP’s doing – Richard was given the seeds and shown how to plant and tend them, with results that visibly delighted Chris on our arrival. Having heard our vehicle, children from the next compound come running to invite us to greet their caregiver. A silverhaired grandmother welcomes us enthusiastically and fetches from her house a stretch of white sackcloth which she unfolds

Oscar van Leer Award 2005

14 years old when his older brother, who had moved into the

to reveal a pile of small, dried silver fish. She demonstrates the differently-sized tin cans which she uses to measure out the fish for her customers in the market – 40 shillings for that amount, 20 shillings for this. She is responsible for nine orphans. The youngest – whom, despite her advancing age, she breast-fed herself – has just begun to walk. As we leave, Chris remarks with quiet satisfaction on how much more healthy and vital she looks than the first time he saw her. Before Chris came to Busia District to work for KORDP two years ago, he had made his career as an accountant in Nairobi – first with General Motors, then with a leading trade union. Now he rides his bicycle around the dirt tracks connecting the villages of West Bukhayo Location, overseeing the distribution of World Food Programme food donations and checking up on the caregivers’ projects. Later today, I will watch him feed medicine to ailing chickens, check on a new breed of pig he’s introduced, and advise a budding horticulturalist on how to find the money for the small-scale irrigation device he wants for his tomatoes. “Do you see,” he asks me, “why I prefer this to an office in the city?”

The centrepiece of KORDP’s approach is the early childhood development daycare centre, known simply as “the ECD”. Here a community’s children gather during daytimes to play, eat a nutritious meal of porridge prepared by volunteer caregivers, and learn literacy and numeracy and basic lessons about health and hygiene. They are taught by volunteers from the community who are trained both by KORDP and the government-run District Centres for Early Childhood Education. KORDP currently has a total of 22 ECDs in two of the locations in which it works: West Bukhayo Location, Matayos Division, Between them they serve 60 villages. KORDP chose these two locations precisely because they had the worst indicators on its initial baseline study of the province. Typically, an ECD is purpose-built on land donated by the community. Community volunteers provide the labour to put up the wood frame and mud walls, and KORDP contributes the metal sheeting for the roof. The result is a compact but functional room, big enough for over a hundred children to gather seated on the floor, with alphabets and numbers and pictures taped to the walls. Some ECDs meet under a tree, or use a local church, while waiting for a more permanent home. In other places, with help from donors, the community and KORDP are constructing bigger structures made from brick. Food for the children’s morning porridge and lunches is provided, as much as possible, by the community: at harvest time everyone is asked to give what they can spare, and it is stored at KORDP’s field office and distributed to the ECDs. But the communities are not yet fully self-sufficient in food and KORDP also seeks donors – in Busia, it is the

Oscar van Leer Award 2005

Busia District, and, 100 km away, Sitikho Location, Webuye Division, Bungoma Dictrict.

World Food Programme (WFP) – to supplement what the communities can contribute and ensure that every child has at least a bowl of porridge and a nutritionally balanced lunch. Aside from the fact that children struggle to learn on an empty stomach, KORDP found that providing WFP food tripled the attendance at the ECDs: children who would otherwise have had to work in the ﬁelds to feed themselves became able to attend. When food is provided, at most ECDs every young child in the community attends. Malnutrition among young children, which had been rife when KORDP started work, has been practically eradicated. The ECDs are meant for 3- to 6-year olds, and many are divided into two rooms – one for the 3- and 4-year olds, another for the 5- and 6-year olds. In practice, children as young as 2 come along, as well as slightly older ones who are not yet able to cope with primary education. Although primary education has been free in Kenya since 2003, children who have never been exposed to a learning environment struggle to adapt. The basic literacy and numeracy taught in the ECDs enable many village children to progress through primary school who would otherwise drop out, and the ECDs are already having a noticeable effect on the performance of the primary schools to which their childen graduate. KORDP

employs a community nurse, who visits the ECDs regularly to treat straight-

forward ailments – worms, head lice, scabies – and seeks help from specialists for more difﬁcult cases. This is a service especially valued by the villagers, who typically live a lengthy trek from the nearest source of medical advice – not worth the trouble if your condition isn’t serious, not physically possible if it is.

It is hard to give accurate ﬁgures for the number of children at ECDs who have lost parents to HIV/AIDS: the situation varies from village to village, and children who have grown up knowing only their caregivers may think of them as parents and misreport. An estimate, though, is that as many as two-thirds of the young children at the ECDs have lost at least one parent, with up to half of those having lost both. Because the communities are poor, and surviving parents may be weakened by HIV/AIDS, even those

Members of the ECD committees in Musaka are performing a role-playing skit they learned in psychosocial support training. Several dozen community members are watching, the women seated on benches under the baking sun, the men gathered in the shade of the ﬁeld’s only tree. In the role-play, a young girl’s parents die, and she is sent to live with a relative where she is treated as a house slave: she prepares the food and is then sent away until the family have eaten, before being allowed back to eat the scraps. The woman playing the role of the caregiver is a natural actress, and plays to the crowd as she exaggeratedly kicks and beats her neighbour playing the orphaned child, who is on her knees sweeping the ﬂoor with an improvised brush of twigs. The audience roars with laughter.

Oscar van Leer Award 2005

children with both parents still alive remain intensely vulnerable.

After a tip-off from the local pastor, a community development motivator from KORDP – played by a blind man, who enters stage left holding a fellow’s arm for guidance – comes to talk to the caregiver. “Don’t you see,” he tells them, “children need love and attention to develop as humans, as well as just food and a roof. This orphan girl is growing up stunted and traumatised, and when she becomes an adult the whole community will suffer.” The skit ends with the caregiver breaking down and repenting heavenwards: “May God forgive me for what I’ve done.” Afterwards, I ask Silas Khaoya – KORDP’s community development motivator in Sitihko – if that ever happens in reality. Can people really be so receptive to the message? Silas looks at me with a quiet amusement that says I should attend more of their training sessions. “It happens.”

KORDP’s

work is distinctive in two ways. The first is the extent to which it recognises

that the most effective way to help orphans is to help their whole communities. The ﬁrst thing KORDP does when it starts working in a community is to propose the establishment of an ECD. The ECD requires seven committees: food security, incomegenerating activities, education, shelter and refurbishment, health, HIV/AIDS and

psychosocial support, and monitoring, evaluation and documentation. Each of these committees needs seven members, making 49 in total – which effectively involves a signiﬁcant chunk of a village’s population. Having gained the blessing of the chief, KORDP’s community development motivators explain the model to the people. The best places to reach them are church services and, with a grimly appropriate practicality, the funerals which the HIV/AIDS pandemic necessitates at a greater than natural frequency – a burial is one place you can be sure to the committee posts, which are often by acclamation as people have discussed their areas of interest in advance. The chairs of the seven committees together form the institutional committee, which elects a chairperson from among their number. The fact that the communities themselves choose the members and leaders of these committees is central. KORDP has found that a top-down approach, though quicker to establish, is not as sustainable. The support must be there from the grassroots up. KORDP then provides the caregivers of orphans and vulnerable children with agricultural

inputs such as seeds and animals, and trains them in how to turn these into both a source of food security and an income-generating activity, or IGA; it’s easy to forget, in societies where division of labour has become the norm, that in subsistence farming communities such as these the idea of learning a trade to earn money is so far from being accepted normality that it requires a three-letter acronym. KORDP’s employees can provide basic advice, and are able to call on experts from the Ministry of Agriculture to provide more specialised training and support in agriculture and livestock.

Oscar van Leer Award 2005

to ﬁnd all the community leaders. KORDP gives notice of a meeting and holds elections

The community members themselves identify which among them is the most in need of assistance. The same principle applies to the food KORDP distributes for the World Food Programme: the community elects a committee who decide on the families most in need. Everything is done democratically, from the bottom-up; Chris and Augustus Barasa, who work from the Busia ofﬁce, are careful to describe themselves not as “managers” but “facilitators”.

“You know,” Chris tells me, “my aim in this job is to get to a stage where I can stop riding my bicycle. I want to be able to sit in my ofﬁce, secure in the knowledge that people who need help and advice will come to me.” He is getting there, but the day is still some way off. The institutional chairman of the Buyende Khurale ECD – another Christopher – is the one with the dream of buying a small-scale irrigation device for his tomatoes, to bring water from the river. The technology costs around 8000 shillings, or approximately 100 euros. But how to raise it? It is too ambitious a target for the merry-go-round, the local name for the scheme in which each member of a group takes it in turn to be the recipient of a small donation from the others. Chris suggests submitting a project proposal to the Community Development Fund, a

government fund which has a certain amount to disburse each year, and they arrange to meet in the office to fill in the form together. Before they part, Chris gently but firmly reminds his namesake that it’s harvest time and he needs to go around the village chivvying his neighbours into making contributions to the ECD food supply. KORDP’s

aim is to make itself redundant in the communities

dependence, Chris never puts someone on the WFP beneﬁciary list twice: they get one set of farm inputs, then they have to stand on their own feet. Slowly but surely, the communities are getting there. When more people like Christopher start turning up at the ofﬁce to seek help with a project proposal without the prompt of a visit from Chris on his bicycle, that will be another important step along the way.

The second way in which KORDP’s work is distinctive is the emphasis it places on psychosocial support. Like income-generating activity, psychosocial support is a fancy phrase with a three-letter acronym (PSS) which describes a concept that’s instinctively familiar – essentially, the idea that when children’s material needs are met, there are still some other things they require to make life worth living.

Oscar van Leer Award 2005

it works with, and move on. Alert to the risk of fostering

In addition to the important but more prosaic training that KORDP offers to the communities it motivates – in IGAs, agriculture, nutrition, health and hygiene – it runs workshops for villagers in PSS. These happen in KORDP’s new training centre in Sitikho Location, a testament to the ingenuity that can conjure a workable structure of substantial size out of a tight budget: the outer walls and roof are all made from metal sheets, and makeshift internal walls of black plastic sheeting divide the men’s and women’s sleeping quarters and the kitchen. Wooden bed frames and mattresses sit under mosquito nets that hang from wires stretched between the timber frames. Outside is a sun oven, a new donation, which uses solar power to bake cakes that will sustain the trainees and also be sold in the local market. The centre can accommodate up to 30 trainees. By all accounts the PSS trainings are highly popular and successful. Their aim is to get people thinking about the issues: how can they create safe and supportive spaces for children to express themselves, and what happens to children if those spaces don’t exist? How does a child feel who has a toy to play with but is socially shunned because she is HIV positive? There are discussions, role-plays and sessions resembling group therapy in which participants think back over the most difﬁcult times in their lives and identify the individuals and mechanisms that helped them to cope. The aim is for trainees to internalise and carry forward the message that young children need not only a full stomach but a loving touch and a listening ear. The grief and confusion of orphaned children is often made worse by the euphemisms of local preachers: at funeral orations, orphans hear that their parents are “only

sleeping” and will “rise again”. Children at the ECDs have been known to watch dead ﬂies to see how long it takes them to rise, and demand in frustration to know why it’s taking their parents so long to wake up. The approach at the ECDs is very different: with motions of rubbing tears from their eyes, children sing songs about the sadness they felt when AIDS took their parents. Speaking openly about HIV/AIDS, and thereby eroding

While we managed to arrive unannounced at homes and ECDs

in West Bukhayo Location, word has spread in Sitikho

Location that there are visitors in the vicinity. The church in Sitikho village which temporarily houses the ECD is packed with committee members from this and neighbouring communities. Shafts of harsh sunlight penetrate the darkness through small windows in the dark mud walls, which provide cool relief from the midday sun. After the children have sung songs and the chairman made introductions, a teacher, Beatrice, gets up to share her concerns: this ECD needs two blackboards. Can KORDP

buy them? Without chiding her for asking, KORDP’s

director, Kathleen Okatcha, sets about opening her eyes to other avenues. She works the congregation with the call-andresponse skills of a preacher.

Oscar van Leer Award 2005

the stigma, is a central aim of PSS.

“Your children here,” she says, gesturing around at the small faces, “are they not children of Kenya?” “Yes,” comes the murmured response. “And should Kenya not be grateful that you are teaching her children literacy?” “Yes.” “So you shouldn’t be afraid to deal with the ministry. Talk to them. Tell them what you need. Isn’t it?” “Yes!” The responses, tentative at ﬁrst, become more emphatic; the sense of empowerment in the room palpably grows. “And you also gather together this community,” Kathleen continues. “Tell them that to teach their children, you need two blackboards. Let them all make their own small contribution.” “Yes!” “And you tell me when to come to the meeting and I’ll make my own small contribution too.”

After moving into development from teaching in the mid-1980s, Kathleen worked for World Vision, Action Aid and HelpAge. It took dedication and persistence for her to grow KORDP to the stage where it could absorb all her energies: when she ﬁrst started seeking funding, in 1996, there was widespread scepticism that the “disease” had taken hold in Kenyan villages. A Ford Foundation-funded study in 1999 provided her with the statistics to be taken seriously. From caring for 50 orphans in 2001, KORDP’s ECDs

now cater to nearer 3000.

The other two members of the senior troika, who got to know each other while working at World Vision, are clear complements to Kathleen’s infectious commitment and drive. Protus Masibo, the thinker and visionary, is during my visit to the field nursing a new dairy goat project, striking out windows from plans for the new office next to the training centre in Sitikho because bricks cost less than glass, and plotting ways to save rent on the office space in Busia by replicating the low-budget Sitikho compound there. Joshua Nyaruri, the hard-headed controller of the purse strings, operates mostly from KORDP’s Nairobi office and squeezes the last ounce out of Masibo’s ingenuity. The staff in the Busia office are similarly impressive: Chris and Augustus Barasa head a team of three strong, no-nonsense women – Mary Kojo, Rose Agala and Geraldine Amusala – PSS facilitator, community development motivator and nurse respectively, each one of them broadly experienced and more than capable of setting up a project in a new district when new funds arrive. If anything, the job achieved

Oscar van Leer Award 2005

As you would expect, personal chemistry plays no small part in KORDP’s success.

by Silas in Sitikho Location is even more impressive: assisted only by a community nurse, Roselyne Barasa, in less than two years he has roused twelve institutional ECD committees whose commitment is evident in the size of the crowds that greet us as we travel around the scheduled stops, and in the disappointment of those who have walked from outlying villages to ask that we add their ECD to the itinerary. One of the most encouraging aspects of KORDP’s community-centred approach is that it flushes out talented people who clearly have the ability to step in and fill roles in the organisation when opportunities for expansion come along. While there are many in the villages who – like Richard with his cabbages, Christoper with his tomatoes and Beatrice with her blackboards – need a boost to their self-confidence, there are others who are born leaders. At the first ECD we visit in Sitikho Location, the institutional chairman hops on the back of the pickup to travel with us; when I’m called on to give speeches, he’s the first on his feet to translate into Bukusu, the local dialect, and by the end of the day he’s practically chairing the meetings; after every stop he seems to collect more passengers for the back of the pickup, so we’re transporting quite a crowd by the time we arrive at the training centre to check on the cakes coming out of the sun oven and the progress of the new office building. KORDP is not well-known outside of the communities in which it works, because the

profile of an NGO in provincial towns tends to be directly related to the location of its office and the frequency with which its vehicles cruise the main road; KORDP’s Busia office is discreetly down a side street, and its staff do most of their work by bike. But within the communities, regard for it is high. The chiefs of neighbouring villages who

want KORDP in their communities far outweigh the available resources; villagers want to come to training sessions on agriculture and livestock even if KORDP doesn’t have the ability to give all of them the startup seeds or animals. The regard in which KORDP is held is demonstrated by its supportive relationships with the local government: the District Centres for Early Childhood Education train its teachers, the Ministry of Agriculture trains its caregivers, and KORDP’s input on crosscutting issues is sought at the quarterly District Development Committee meetings. It is in Busia, and by the list of donors: as well as the Bernard van Leer Foundation and WFP, KORDP

has received financial support from the American Jewish World Service, UNICEF,

the Regional Psychosocial Support Initiative (REPSSI), the Embassy of France, Peace Child International, Rotary Club International, Lutheran World Relief, the National AIDS Control Council and others. Its approach has also been commended by the World Bank. KORDP’s

approach shows every sign of being replicable. Through an umbrella

organisation called Orphans Development Programme International, it has sister organisations in Uganda, Tanzania and DR Congo. A community that borders West Bukhayo, Busibwayo, has even set up its own ECDs without waiting for KORDP’s arrival: having seen that the children from the next villages were healthier, happier and doing better in school, they organised themselves and within the space of a fortnight had established three ECDs catering to over 200 children. There is still much to be done. Sitikho Location, with its 35 villages and 22,000 inhabitants, represents roughly half of KORDP’s current ECDs. It is one of four locations

Oscar van Leer Award 2005

also evidenced by the World Food Programme trusting KORDP to handle its distribution

in Webuye Division; which is one of seven divisions in Bungoma District; there are four districts in Western Province, and eight provinces in Kenya.

Mang’ana village, Sitikho Location: the back of the pickup is laden with travellers from earlier ECDs, and we are faced with another impressive turnout: the best part of a hundred people have congregated at next to no notice and with no explicit request, doubling the number of children in the field. Rumbling clouds are gathering overhead, and the meeting is outdoors because this is a new location and the ECD is not yet finished: the timber frame is up, awaiting the mud and the metal roofing. The institutional chairman, resplendent in jacket and tie, tells us the volunteer labourers are ready and the children will be inside by next week. He gestures to the plot of land on which the structure is being raised – two acres of it – and asks an old man to stand up and join him. The old man’s name is Tawai Sirengo; he has nine orphaned grandchildren. He shuffles over gingerly; he has a tufty white beard, his bald scalp is stretched tightly over his skull, his eyes rheumy with cataracts. The chairman tells us that the old man has donated these two acres of land to the

ECD.

As he takes his neighbours’ applause, Kathleen darts out

of her chair and envelops him in a hug. It is not a unique story. A large new brick structure is going up to house Munongo ECD in West Bukhayo location, Busia district, also on land donated by a white-bearded grandfather, Paul Ouma. What especially excites this man is not the new pig or chickens that KORDP have given to the neediest caregivers a well, so the children will no longer have to trek through the marshes to the river to carry water. There are crocodiles there; they killed his wife.

In villages typically consisting of several hundred people, there is scarcely a villager whose extended family does not include a potential beneﬁciary of an ECD. The Bernard van Leer Foundation supports KORDP because its approach of strengthening communities works well for young children made vulnerable by the HIV/AIDS pandemic. But you could equally turn it round and say that KORDP imaginatively uses young children as an entry point to revitalise communities. Thinking about the future of its children challenges a community to bring out the best in itself. These communities are like the land with shallow topsoil that farmers give up on when it won’t grow maize: as HIV/AIDS has caused traditional ways of life to crumble,

Oscar van Leer Award 2005

in the community, but that they have found the funds to dig

communities have also become run down through lack of ideas, knowledge, organisation and self-belief. Planting an ECD unleashes the potential of communities, just as planting sorghum does for the soil.

Copyright © 2005 by the Bernard van Leer Foundation, The Netherlands. The Bernard van Leer Foundation encourages the fair use of this material. Proper citation is requested. All rights reserved on the images. All photos by Wendy Stone, freelance photographer based in Kenya. In the photo opposite his introduction, Peter Laugharn, Executive Director, is pictured visiting KORDP in July 2005. Design: Homemade Cookies (cookies.nl)

The Bernard van Leer Foundation The Bernard van Leer Foundation <www.bernardvanleer.org> aims to enhance opportunities for children growing up in circumstances of social and economic disadvantage. It concentrates on children 0-8 years.

The Oscar van Leer Award The Oscar van Leer Award was instituted in 1994 and is presented every two years. It honours programmes ‘for excellence in enabling parents and communities to help young children realise their full potential’.

The recipient of the Oscar van Leer Award 2005 Kenya Orphans Rural Development Programme (KORDP) <www.kordp.org> strengthens the ability of families and communities to care for orphans and vulnerable children. Working in areas of Kenya’s Western province worst affected by the HIV/AIDS pandemic, it helps rural communities to set up early childhood development day care centres. These provide young children with nutritious meals, opportunities for social and psychological development, and preschool learning without which many would not go on to primary school. KORDP trains caregivers in health, nutrition, improving food security and establishing income-generating activites. While it provides essential inputs, mobilising and empowering communities is the key to KORDP’s success.

Eisenhowerlaan 156, 2517 KP The Hague, The Netherlands P.O. Box 82334, 2508 EH The Hague, The Netherlands Tel: +31 (0)70 331 22 00, Fax: +31 (0)70 350 23 73 Email: registry@bvleerf.nl Web: www.bernardvanleer.org