Waterviews

by Bruno Deceukelier - Volens has crosscutting issues, themes that should run throughout all the programmes worldwide:

1. Gender
2. People with disabilities
3. Ecology/environment

In Southern Africa, we also added HIV/AIDS as an important issue that should be included in our approach, as well as child participation specifically for the programme I’m facilitating.

Crosscutting means that though we have different activities, we always try to keep these themes in the back of our head and be sensitive about it. For example, if you organise a 5-day workshops in Harare around food processing, it will be difficult to have women participate because they can hardly stay away from home so long. When you know that women are primarily involved in food processing, you have to adjust your programme to have the trainings closer to their homes and to keep them short. This is an example of how you can be gender sensitive.

Sometimes it does mean sensitising our partners or their beneficiaries regarding these themes, which can be quite a task. Our programmes already ask a lot of time and effort, but you can work around these issues by simply building on other initiatives and benefit from those. 
Like here, when several embassies were organising a photo competition for children 10-14 year to illustrate the importance of water for 5th of June World Environment Day.

Any tool such as photography or video can be used as an artistic self expression tool, and when we can have it focus on ecology, it’s like killing two birds with one stone (hum, that doesn’t sound very environment-friendly ;-).

In total, over 32 children from our Harare partners participated, sending in disposable cameras of each 15 pictures they had been given. This picture, my personal favourite, was made by 14 year old Tinotenda from Chiedza Child Care Centre.

He didn’t win though, coming in a deserved fourth from over 600 pictures.

The winner was this picture: