Edmore Masendeke and Nyasha N’onzwe
The COVID-19 pandemic has wiped away many people’ livelihoods. It’s been lockdown after lockdown. Many businesses have closed shop. A lot of jobs have been lost. It’s not been conducive for informal sector activities either.
With only 2% of Zimbabweans with disabilities employed in the formal sector, most of them are self-employed or engage in informal trading activities. Thus, their activities were severely hit over the past two years. And it has been an extremely difficult time for most of them.
As Endless Possibilities, we have been helping a group of people with disabilities in Dzivarasekwa survive through this difficult time. We have been giving them grocery hampers with food and other basics over the past two years. However, we do not have the capacity, nor is it our plan, to continue doing this.
As Endless Possibilities, we have been giving people with disabilities in Dzivarasekwa grocery hampers with food and other basics over the past two years.
As the economy has reopened, we want to help them become more self-sufficient. We visited them last month with some groceries. During the visit, we spoke to them about starting income generating projects. Most of them already had ideas of the income generating projects that they would like to be involved in. These range from home-run chicken and rabbit projects to hoarding and selling bales of second-hand clothes or shoes. Most of them have been involved in these activities before. They said that they only needed funding to start their projects.
Endless Possibilities aims to empower people with disabilities to live self-sufficient lives. As a small organisation, we mainly focus on skills development activities and work with other stakeholders to provide additional support. In August last year, we did a business skills development course for the group via WhatsApp.Starting their own income generating projects would give them an opportunity to put the principles that they were taught into practice.
One of the ladies in Dzivarasekwa had a chicken project before the pandemic.
We therefore invite anyone who is willing to help this group of people with disabilities by funding their income generating projects to contact us.
I’m not sure why but this blog is loading extremely slow for me. Is anyone else having this problem or is it a issue on my end? I’ll check back later and see if the problem still exists.