Rotary/Cordaid/Stop Aids Now Peri-Urban Project

Mid Term Financial Report - Swaziland

The project is progressing very well and we have been receiving great feed back from the communities that we are working with. We stressed the importance of community participation at the beginning and we have been very impressed with the commitment that is being made by many community members. The project has also managed to get the issue of peri-urban poverty into the local media. The project has largely assisted with promoting the issues related to this ignored and underestimated social problem and it is hoped that government and city councils will at some point take over partly from where donors have been working.

The project started off slowly due to significant time spent meeting with community leadership groups and establishing working committees for each of the project areas. Actual project work and funds expenditure really only began half way through the year. Since then we have worked hard on both the funded project work and the local contribution side of things. In addition to the expenditure seen below, there has been two soup kitchens constructed and due to commence operation in December this year. Each soup kitchen will cost around R40,000 a year to run on a daily basis, feeding 200 children daily. We have also conducted first aid training refresher courses for the Rural Health Motivators in each community.

Planned activities for 2006

There is planned to be some significant activity early 2006, with the commencement of the sanitation and accommodation parts of the project. Manzini Youth Care has employed a full time community liaison officer to assist with rolling out these parts of the project, along with undertaking other project work. The food and medical parts of the project will continue with monthly purchases of medical supplies and mealie meal. For these project focus areas, it is estimated that funds should last until around the middle of next year. Finally the water access project will roll out to Murray Camp and SKOM communities once the landowners have given their consent to use the land. An initial attempt to construct a borehole in Murray Camp was blocked by the landowners despite community pleas, so a community meeting set for the 27^th of this month should assist in resolving this issue. SKOM is also facing similar problems with the town council having recently evicted some squatter residents and torn down their houses. We will continue to push forward and see what we can do to give clean water access to this community. If this proves difficult we will expand the water projects in both Ticancweni and Moneni, as there are still parts of the community finding it difficult to access the water sites we have constructed.