Disabilities in Zambia

The academies that Goal Zambia is affiliated with welcome individuals with disabilities, of which there is over 2 million in the country, something that does not always happen with social stigma often directed towards them. This includes physical, sensory, psychosocial and intellectual disabilities and, although it is difficult to build a team football team for those with difficulties, the academies we work with make a concious effort to encourage them to attend training on the pitch and provide support for them. Perhaps one day there will be a team available for them to join. Diseases and conditions are prevelant in a country with high levels of extreme poverty and these include Schistosomiasis, a waterbourne disease, blindness from lack of vitamin B in some localities and polio, to name a few.

Those with physical difficulties also face major consequential challenges across Zambia, particularly in relation to HIV prevention, testing and treatment and their access to services is not on an equal basis with everybody else. There are a similar number of people with physical difficulties as those that are HIV positive. Girls with disabilities also face increased sexual partner intimidation and violence and restricted access to information concerning these dangers, leading to a greater potential for infection and re-infection with HIV. Access to educational facilities and subsequently lower level of literacy also leads to greater poverty and greater risk of sexual and physical abuse. Interviews with people in Zambia have revealed that negative attitudes towards them also restrict their opportunities to marry and have children. People assume that those with physical difficulties are not sexually active so question why they even need access to HIV treatment. Hope fully the academies we are working with will continue to encorage inclusion of those with disabilities and introduce an acceptance of this at the community level.

The same is true for children with difficuties in the country. School access can be difficult or denied and with it access to primary sources of information that can mean the difference between life and death. Families can also harbour their own internal discriminatory attitudes that don't eleviate the problem. Often those that are HIV positive and have manged to get antireviral treatment are reliant on another family member to support them to access this, which may not, for this or that reason, always be forthcoming or consistent. Those unable to attend appointments as a result are often labelled as defaulters by service providers, who thereafter require them to attend more frequent appointments and limit their supply of medicines. There is a lack of health information produced in formats such as simplified versions, braille, large print and sign language symbols, suitable for those with sensory or intellectual impairments.

Helthcare worker and providers of HIV services also lack the knowledge, training and experience to work and communicate effectively and address the needs of children and adults with physical and learning difficulties.

The government of Zambia has signed up to a number of international and regional treaties agreeing on the equal treatment of those with health difficulties, including the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and it's own 2012 Person's with Disabilities Act yet the good intentions and strategies to provide services have not always come to fruition. Dispite an awareness of the situation, international donars and the United Nations have also fallen short of helping much.

Goal Zambia aims to encourage academies to continue to work towards inclusion of all children and young adult members and provide support for them to achieve this.

Zambia: Where is it then?

The bottom half of Africa



Chop the continent of Africa in half at around the equator and Zambia is sort of in the middle of the bottom half. It's landlocked, so the Bantu don't bother learning to swim and open their eyes wide in amazement when you try to describe the sea, and bordered by Conrad's massive Democratic Republic of Congo, Angola and Tanzania in the north and Namibia, Botswana and Zimbabwe to the south. Malawi lies directly east across the nearest thing to the sea, Lake Tanganyika, where the Zambians get a lot of their fish. The Zambians like fish, especially the little ones called Kapenta; they provide a cheaper source of protein than meat or caterpillars.

The country is big, with a total area of 752, 614 square kilometres and is drained by two major rivers, the Zambezi, the river the country takes it's name from, bordering Zimbabwe in the south and the African Queen Congo flowing north. The sprawling Zambezi basin covers three quarters of the country, the remaining quarter the basin for the Congo. A number of rivers flow across the Zambezi basin; the Kabompo, Lungwebungu and the Luangwa and Kafue, the confluence of which marks the Zimbabwean border. In the southwest of the country, near the former capital Livingstone, the waters of the Zambezi drop over 100 metres at the site of the famous Victoria Falls, whence it flows into Lake Kariba, site of the infamous dam.

The Zambezi across to Zimbabwe



A landlocked country creates it's own dynamics and is important in the history of the nation, the past and present day economics and in the well documented and devastating spread of pandemics, notably HIV and Aids. It also means there are more that usual  big match football derbies for the Chipolopolo national team. Little excuse is needed for a national football tournament with neighbours at any level, at any time of the year. The stakes and interest are always high and even the Seventh Day Adventist find ample justification to gather in front on the television for the Saturday matches.

Radio Interview

In this interview, originally broadcast live on BBC Radio Leicester's Afternoon show with Jeremy Vine on 30th January 2014, Steve Baker, coordinator of Goal Zambia, discusses some aspects of the project in Africa and the wider personal motivation behind it.

Video

 

Players from the under 14's boys team train on the pitch in Chainda compound. This was the first kit they had ever worn and was donated to the academy by the Oadby Owls Football Club, Leicester, England. They won the subsequent match 4-1 against a team they had never previously beaten. I think the kits helped. You could tell by the look on their faces.

Kelly's Expenditure

Manda Hill shopping centre

In a land of extreme poverty, there is extravagance but not for 80% of the population. You can see the extravagances in the gleaming tinted windows of the 4x4's parked up in the car parks of the two major city shopping centres and in the shops window displays within. Most signs of personal material wealth are kept securely hidden behind anti-personal high voltage electricity and razor wire topped ten foot garden walls, in the affluent leafy tree lined shady suburban city tarmac streets and out of bounds and minds of the people of the compounds.

It's difficult to comprehend how in a land where the price of food is comparable to the UK, families of rarely fewer than 6 or 8 live on less than the equivalent of £2 per day. At first glance you assume the cost of living must be cheaper and at second glance it just doesn't add up. Third glance brings a sort of feeling akin to despair. Despair doesn't feed the families though. I suppose it's a question of removing the extravagances of life, at least those that we are used to, and by that I mean myself.

Boy

Much of life without extravagances involves survival and I suppose that despite our western extravagances and luxuries, we too in the west simply survive. Our survival generally is arguably easier, although that detracts from people who have to exist hand to mouth in the UK too. This website isn't about them though. There is absolutely no system of social security or unemployment benefits in Zambia. The poor are left to beg, borrow, grow and most notably, share between themselves.

I didn't visit Zambia and asking people I met how they spent the money they had raised each day so I don't know how they did it. Family and tribal ties and values are very different in Zambia and southern Africa and this is conducive to feeding the those in extreme poverty. It means people don't starve to death and the consistency of the rainy season in Zambia has avoided any agricultural and subsequent humanitarian crisis' in recent years of memory. Political issues surrounding the production, cost and distribution of mealie-meal continue to have consequences in the country. If the rains don't turn up or are erratic the food situation is fragile. Starvation is just around the corner. Malnutrition is common, somewhat normal.

Shopping centre fast food place

Kelly Mukuka, the Head Coach of the Dynamic Stars Academy and founder of the Dynamic Ministries Football League provided me with a insight into his monthly expenditure. He is by no means one of the poorest in the compound and he has an extended family and different ways and means of an income but his circumstances give some idea of life in the country. He sells clothes and shoes to friends and neighbours.  I think it's somewhat frugal and it needs to be. Kelly raises money for the academy and takes 20% for his own daily/monthly necessities. These can be broken down as follows:

• Accomodation - he needs a two roomed house, essential for secure storage of the football equipment he has accumulated for the academy. This would cost in the region of K700 (£70-£80)  per month, including electricity. He doesn't have one at the moment as he was forced to leave his last residence after the landlord put the rent up. He now shares his aunties 12x10 foot  windowless shed and single bed with his 18 year old nephew, Emmanual. Emmanual doesn't mind one bit and they get on well but there is little room for the equipment which is stacked up along one wall on top of a bit of furniture brought from his last house. He's a pastor, an unpaid position, at the weekends at one of the hundreds of local churches and so he has an old suit. He's proud of this and likes to hang it up on a coat hanger on the far wall. At the foot of the bed is a table housing a small and, i suppose broken would be the word, television. Houses can be found for £30-£40 per month but these would not have electricity. 
• Food - he needs 1 bag of mealie meal a month (15kg?) at K70 (just over £7). This would give him nshima once a day. Kelly eats in the evening, after the sun has set and it's too dark to play football any longer. 
• Charcoal - the electricity is good but it's unreliable and goes off several times a week. Something i don't really understand to do with surges. You hear people talk about it but not in a way they are bothered about. It just happens like the sun going down. It remains a luxury one can and does live without. Many people either can't even afford it or make do without it - it's less hassle that way. An extravagance with electricity for the rich is having your own generator. A supply of charcoal for the month costs K50 (just over a fiver). If you have time but no money for charcoal there is always bits and pieces to be found and gathered from rubbish at the sides of the road or landfill sites. Electricity has hidden costs aswell. If you have a supply and want to uses it, you also need a cooker. Some people just have one of the electric spiral metal hob rings detached from a cooker and resting on a breeze block with two wires attached. It's ok but you can't cook scones and thing like that on a hob; myou need an oven. Ovens are ezpensive and as a result, often communal. I have a story about an oven for another time.
• Spending money - Kelly finds that this adds up to K20 (£2) daily and is used to add beans to his diet, transport to the city costs or to provide fritters for the academy children at the pitch following training.
• Misc - K20 (£2) monthly. This covers such extigencies as candles and some matches to light them. He needs pay-as-you-go credit on his mobile phone but never has that much. You can buy 20p Talktime scratch cards from the little shack shops.

Chainda Compound shopping centre

His total monthly expenditure amounts to something like £150. In my opinion that's pretty frugal in a land where the cost of living, to reiterate, is not that much different from the UK.

Decky - Dynamic Stars Academy

Decky

This is Decky aged seven and the coach asked him to stand where you see him so I could take his photograph. An understandably shy boy, when faced by a strange bloke with a camera from a incomprehensible land he knows only in his imagination, he lives in Chainda compound with his father and unspecified other members of his extended family. I hope he gets to see the photograph of himself there one day. On the Chainda compound pitch with the Dynamic Stars Decky plays out of his skin in midfield for Manchester United, Zambia and most of all himself. He would love some boots or better still trainers and then he could wear them all the time. If he went to school he would proudly wear them there.

Mary Mwanza - Dynamic Stars Academy

Mary 

Mary is a 13 year old who lives in Chainda compound, Lusaka with her birth mother, her five brothers and two sisters. Her father has died. She has a very beautiful wide awake smile when she stands there and talks and she laughs a lot. She joined the DSA in 2013 after hearing about the academy from her friends and now plays as a central defender for the girls team.

Mary explained to me that if she was not playing football then she would be working selling fruit on the local village market stall with her mother, a job I imagine, with that smile, she is very good at. She doesn't attend school. Although she did complete a year in Grade 5 she didn't pass the end of year tests and now her mother has no money to pay the school fees. They are around £30 per year.

DSA lasses team

Many girls of Mary's age and in similar circumstances get married. There are rules but these are not always strictly followed or enforced. Girls in the compounds commonly become sexually active from as young as 10 years old and marriage is a way to relieve the poverty on the family and relatives they live with. None of this helps with the Aids and HIV situation and often exacerbates other health and social challenges facing those in extreme poverty in urban Zambia. Many girls and families are faced with little or no alternative.

Mary told me that she really wanted to go back to school and asked for some money to do so. Her favourite subjects there were English and Maths. Everybody, or so it seems, likes English and Maths. She explained that the academy needed jerseys, boots, footballs and stockings. Her favourite teams are her own Dynamic Stars and the Zambian national team.

I hope she goes to school again because I could really tell she wanted to when I sat and s[poke to her.