ASAP Africa - The Way Forward

ASAP's strategy is focused clearly on ASAP's mission - to cultivate self-reliance in Africa.

Implementation of ASAP Africa's 5 year action plan will:

• Increase the household income of 30,000 households annually in Zimbabwe by scaling-up the Village Savings &Lending (VS&L) project. ($1,050,000 @ $35 per beneficiary.
• Improve the household security for 20,000 families annually in Zimbabwe by improving crop yields through skills training in conjunction with VS&L implementation.($900,000 @ $45 per beneficiary)
• Implement a Youth Entrepreneurial Project to improve academic performance and entrepreneurial skills in 140 primary schools in eastern Zimbabwe. The 5 year project supports extracurricular teacher and student math & English reading club activities from grade 3 to 7. The integration of VS&L savings club activities at grade 7 (the last year of primary school) will increase the number of children continuing to secondary school or better prepare them with entrepreneurial life skills. ($375,000 per year)
• Establish a Resource Center for Education and Vocational skills training facility. RCEV will provide vocational skills training to school leavers while filling the need for school buildings, teacher housing, furniture and teaching aids for schools. ASAP generated average annual income of $33,500 from 1996-2004 through a similar facility in Zimbabwe. The RCEV will also include VS&L training componenet to build capacity of other organizations to implement the methodology effectively; from field work, project monitoring and evaluation, training community facilitators, and data capture. ($1,350,000)
  

  Once ASAP's vision is in place, over 40,000 families in Zimbabwe realize tangible improvements in the quality of their daily lives each year through ASAP’s program. In addition, over 5,000 children will be better prepared for the future with entrepreneurial skills and improved teaching and learning. A sustainable funding base will be established through a vocational training social enterprise that will help to improve the quality of education in Zimbabwe and further ASAP's mission. Staff retention and motivation will increase as ASAP matures into a more viable international organization with systems in place to replicate ASAP's program.
  

  History of ASAP

  Since 1994 ASAP has tried various approaches to affect positive change in communities in Africa. Unitl 2001 in Zimbabwe, ASAP worked closely with clusters of schools and school development committees to prioritize and address needs for education infrastructure. ASAP helped communities throughout Zimbabwe build 136 teacher's houses and 171 classrooms. ASAP's Building with Education program allowed students studying building to carry out their practical experience on nearby construction jobsites. At ASAP's urban carpentry training center, 40 unemployed school leavers earned certificates and found employment. In addition, through ASAP's Carpentry Outreach Project, 117 rural carpenters attended 4-week intensive carpentry training workshops. The rural schools paid these graduates to build over 1,900 4-seater desks from kits produced at  Tinovaka. ASAP supplied all the materials for these desk kits, funded by donors, and generated income from this. ASAP also provided book binding training to help schools maintain and salvage precious schoolbooks.
  

  While these pre-2001 efforts were quite fruitful, they lacked local leadership and were unsustainable. During this time ASAP generated its own operating support hrough a successful social enterprise; Tinovaka Training Centre for woodworking produced durable school furniture kits and provided training and tools for rural carpenters to build this furniture at rural Zimbabwe schools. By 2005 the program had become unviable and was closed due to the increasingly severe economic decline that had gripped Zimbabwe since 2001.
  

  As a direct result of this economic decline, ASAP shifted program focus to VS&L, to help families survive the deteriorating environmonet with skills for sustainable livelihood activities. This micro-finance model is now the core of ASAP's programming and the starting point from which to identify and implement other locally identified needs such as agriculture production, health, nutrition and food security plus teach children's rights and women's rights. integration of VS&L, building on the community based leadership and active participation already established, stengthens other interventions, making these more cost effective and effective..Click here to learn more about how the VS&L Program works. ASAP is proud to have worked int partnership with Catholic Relief Services, Plan International, Concern World Wide and CARE to maximize the impact of our work by working together.

  Education

  
  Since 2000, ASAP has been working with selected primary schools in Eastern Zimbabwe to improve the teaching and learning of math through the Bridge the Gap Project (BTG). Mastering Math skills teaches children to think and reason, breaking the barrier to academic success across the curriculum and throughout life. Through teacher's and student's math clubs in 140 schools, ASAP supports teachers in their efforts to strengthen rural math teaching skills and encourage students to enjoy learning math.