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The Project Visit
The purpose of the project visit is to witness first hand the beneficial effects of VSO's work in East Africa. Details of your visit are to be confirmed, but a description of the project visited last year is given below.
"Going to visit a project was one of the greatest highlights (of the trip) for me - it was hard to previously conceive how difficult it was for people to live in such absolute poverty. You see true hardship all the time on TV and somehow become immune to its horrors, but actually going there and speaking to a family suffering with HIV was extremely touching and as monumental for me as making it to Uhuru."
Charlotte Connatty,
Accenture Kilimanjaro trekker 2006
Example of a VSO project in Nairobi:
Lea Toto programme, Nairobi
The Nyumbani children's home was founded in 1992 to provide a home for HIV positive abandoned orphans.
Unable to cope with the increasing number of referrals to the Orphanage, the Lea Toto (meaning to 'raise a child' in Swahili) programme started initially as a mobile outreach to HIV positive children within slum communities in Nairobi. Eight years on and the programme is now in touch with over 3000 HIV positive children and families, providing support, care and treatment.
The overall goal of the project is to mitigate the impact of HIV & AIDS and decrease the risk of HIV transmission through provision of Home Based Care. The objectives of the project are to:
- Provide 3000 HIV positive children and an estimated 15000 family members with high quality home based care and counselling services.
- Provide a package of social support services to at least 50% of the HIV positive children and their families.
- Improve the organisational capacity of Lea Toto Programme to deliver high quality care and counselling services for HIV+ children and their families.
- Enhance the ability of the targeted communities to prioritise needs of HIV+ children, their families and to carry out activities to meet those needs.
- Provide the target communities with the skills necessary to negotiate, support and maintain safe behaviours
As the programme targets children who are HIV positive, it works with families to ensure that they need normal lives. Lea Toto strives to facilitate processes aimed at creating and designing coping mechanisms by the communities for the care of the increasing number of children who are HIV+ as well as other orphans. To accomplish this, the programme's activities include:
- Voluntary counselling and testing
- Provision of medical services and nursing care
- Provision of Anti-Retroviral Therapy
- Psychosocial support
- Skills training for care-givers to offer home-based care
- Nutritional support
- Identification of foster families for abandoned children
- Home visits
- Emergency assistance for needy cases
- Promotion of economic sustainability of families
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