Future Plans
The main short to medium term objectives for the Home are:
EXPAND THE SCHOOL AND NUMBER OF CHILDREN TAUGHT AND ACCOMMODATED
We have recently increased the number of children taught and accommodated at the Home by expanding the school curriculum to include Grade 6 of the standard Zambian primary school curriculum.
This means the school now has 31 children, which is an additional 6 children compared to last year.
The plan is to further expand the school curriculum to include Grade 7 of the standard Zambian primary school curriculum in 2025.
This means educating, accommodating, and sustaining the extra pupils and ensuring a supportive and welcoming environment for the children.
USE OF NURSERY AND PRE-SCHOOL EXPANSION
We were funded by very generous donors to furnish and equip a nursery and pre-school area. We plan to expand the number of children using this facility, hopefully by having infants who attend daily on a non-residential basis.
We will continue to provide meals and learning materials to the additional infants and the service is likely to include the use of the school minibuses to collect and return the children to and from their home on a daily basis.
ROOF AND GENERAL REPAIRS
Over the past years, minimal repair work has been undertaken at the Home due to the lack of funds.
This has meant that several areas need repairs quite urgently, especially the roofs of several buildings which have fairly substantial leaks.
We, therefore, plan to make repairs to these areas and, if money and resources are available, to re-roof some of the buildings.
INSTALL MORE SOLAR POWER
With the increasing cost and unreliability of power supplies in Zambia at present, we are looking to install solar power to help provide lighting and other general electricity requirements.
The Home does have some old solar geysers which we are also looking to rehabilitate to provide hot water for the Home. These have not functioned for several years.
ACQUIRE NEWER MINI-BUSES
Currently the Home’s transport consists of two old mini-buses which we use for all the Home’s transport needs, including ferrying the children to various places such as the hospital and collecting supplies.
One mini-bus is 26 years old and the other is 21years old. The reliability of the mini-buses has declined significantly and the cost of repairs and maintenance has increased.
Our plan is to replace the older of the mini-buses with a newer vehicle, probably a used model due to the cost of a new mini-bus, which will provide more reliability.
This will also help with the expected additional usage due to the increased number of children and expected need to use the mini-bus to collect and return the infants daily for the nursery and pre-school.
RESTART OUTREACH PROGRAMME
Many years ago, the Home had an outreach programme where visits were made in Lusaka and Kabwe rural areas to central points and individual homes to provide physiotherapy, support and assistance to disabled children who had no access to such services.
Sadly, this was discontinued due to the financial situation of the Home.
We are planning to restart the programme in the future. Whilst this is a very large undertaking and will need the use of a 4x4 vehicle (due to the poor state of the rural roads), a physiotherapist and extra resources, such as fuel, driver and supplies, we feel it is a very necessary undertaking.
Many disabled children in these areas get little or no help. An excellent example is what a physiotherapist who was involved in providing the service in the past recited when they visited a child in a thatched hut in a rural village. The child was looked after by his grandmother who kept him in the hut virtually his whole life because of the stigma and difficulty in looking after the child. The child’s main visitor was the physiotherapist.