Tigwepo - March, 2017 24
1. Products that offer affordable and sustainable solutions for rural communities; and
2. Services to help organisations function better
ZGF has already began implementing projects under both strands, first by partnering with VITALITE Zambia, a provider of ‘PAYGO’ solar home systems, to enable communities to access affordable and clean lighting solutions. The project was rolled out in Muchinga in October with ZGF acting as distributor and Development Organisation for Peoples’ Empowerment (DOPE) acting as hub or agent of VITALITE products. Since then DOPE has sold over seventy units to the local community.
Leveraging its experience providing capacity development support to civil society ZGF has also begun to offer customized training to both profit and non-profit organisations. These include resource mobilization, social media for advocacy and knowledge management solutions. Most recently ZGF held a two day resource mobilisation training for People’s Action Forum (PAF) and the Vice Chairperson, Sarah Ngoma remarked, "All along we were doing guess work but now we are going to have a clear plan of how we can mobilise resources in a coordinated manner for our organisation”.
With the first few months of this new and exciting journey behind us we look back and reflect on what we have done but are also encouraged to keep going to find ways to ‘keep our doors’ open and continue to support Zambian civil society. As our CEO, Barbara Nost commented, “We have been talking about building a social enterprise for a long time but now it’s not just talk, we have hit the ground running. Through our social enterprise we hope to co-finance our programs, to support CSOs with sustainable solutions and affordable services.”