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Misisi Keeping Families Together

Lusaka, Zambia

Misisi Compound is notoriously known as the worst and most neglected slum in Lusaka. With one hundred thousand inhabitants and no public schools, police stations, or health clinics, this perception appears quite accurate.

Lack of proper hygiene, coupled with the overwhelming HIV/AIDS problem in the country, has led to a high proportion of sicknesses and deaths, resulting in scores of orphans.   Some of these orphans have a grandparent or other relative that tries to care for them, even though many of them are barely able to care for themselves; but even this is not always an option.  Up to one thousand children in Misisi live in “child-headed families” - orphaned brothers and sisters who depend only on each other for survival.

Kids Alive’s “Keeping Families Together” program in Misisi seeks to combat this problem through providing a unique and thoroughly holistic model of care. By merging the Care Center model that has been established successfully in several Kids Alive fields with a more ‘family-based focus’, our program aims to provide optimum benefit to the orphans and vulnerable children within Misisi Compound.  Our goal is to enable and empower these children’s guardians so that the children can stay at home, rather than enter the already overcrowded orphanage system in Zambia.  The plan is to begin modestly, with 25 children from the most dire of circumstances supported, but with the goal of expanding as funding, staffing, and facilities allow.