Family Hope Charity in Zambia - Construction and Life Skills Training

For many years my ‘hobby’ has been assisting chronically poor people acquire the training and skills needed to start their own small business. This interest of mine together with the encouragement and support of several friends, lead me to start Family Hope Charity in 2006. As a way of preparing myself and Family Hope Charity to engage in this ‘hobby’ full time in Kenya, I spent two years in Kabwe, central Zambia, working with two HIV/Aids non-governmental organizations. I was asked by these NGO’s to design and implement a construction and life skills training program that targeted street youth living in a large slum called Makululu on the edge of the city of Kabwe. The construction skills training was a ‘hands-on’ learn-by-doing program because most of the young trainees were illiterate both in English and in their mother tongue. The ‘lessons’ were the actual construction of houses for the guardians of HIV/Aids orphans and their dependants. These guardians were usually grandmothers in their 60’s and 70’s raising their orphaned grandchildren since their own children had died of HIV/Aids. Pictured above is the third group of street youth we worked with standing near some of the houses they along with the other groups of homeless street youth built for HIV/Aids orphans. The last training project the street kids worked on and completed was construction of a 400 square foot youth centre in Makululu. To give the young trainees a broad exposure to a variety of construction technologies we used traditional masonry and also stabilized soil construction.


During the two years I was in Kabwe, Family Hope Charity trained 40 young men and women in building construction and erected eleven different structures, including seven houses, two workshops, one dormitory for a street boy centre and one youth centre. Towards the end of my time in Kabwe we had attracted the attention of a Canadian foundation that wanted to build a secondary school in Makululu and were commmitted to using our street kid trainees as the building crew. The program was also receiving offers to construct commericial building as a way of raising money to sustain the project. The two young men pictured above, who were part of our second class were able to get work in Kabwe as bricklayers after participating in our program and are seen here constructing a house for a local merchant.