Angola: Review of CORD community services for Angolan refugees in Western Province, Zambia

By Oliver Bakewell, independent consultant
Evaluation and Policy Analysis Unit

UNHCR's Evaluation and Policy Analysis Unit (EPAU) is committed to the systematic examination and assessment of UNHCR policies, programmes, projects and practices. EPAU also promotes rigorous research on issues related to the work of UNHCR and encourages an active exchange of ideas and information between humanitarian practitioners, policymakers and the research community. All of these activities are undertaken with the purpose of strengthening UNHCR's operational effectiveness, thereby enhancing the organization's capacity to fulfil its mandate on behalf of refugees and other displaced people. The work of the unit is guided by the principles of transparency, independence, consultation, relevance and integrity.

Evaluation and Policy Analysis Unit
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
Case Postale 2500 1211 Geneva 2 Switzerland
Tel: (41 22) 739 8249
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All EPAU evaluation reports are placed in the public domain. Electronic versions are posted on the UNHCR website and hard copies can be obtained by contacting EPAU. They may be quoted, cited and copied, provided that the source is acknowledged. The views expressed in EPAU publications are not necessarily those of UNHCR. The designations and maps used do not imply the expression of any opinion or recognition on the part of UNHCR concerning the legal status of a territory or of its authorities.

Contents

Introduction
Community services and community development
Refugees in Zambia
CORD's community services programmes in Zambia
Refugee perceptions of community services
Highlighting some challenges
Conclusions
Recommendations

Annex 1: Survey questionnaire and results
Annex 2: Report forms

Acknowledgements

This review has only been made possible through the co-operation of the large number of people who agreed to speak with me. I am particularly grateful to the refugees in Mayukwayukwa and Nangweshi who gave their time and put up with yet another person asking questions with very little to offer in return. I am also grateful for the welcome and assistance which I received from CORD staff in Lusaka and the field. I would not have got anywhere in the camps without the assistance of Dinis André Kavavu and Eugenio Chipaka in translation. I was also assisted by Rigobertu Alcides, Clarissa Mukinda, Brian Yowanu, Chingumbu Kabembe, Antonio Luis, Israel Kanjomba, Azer Kusambi, Florinda Chinoya and Charity Mukebesa who helped in carrying out the questionnaire survey.

These and many others helped me acquire some understanding of CORD's community service programmes in Zambia. There were many individuals and groups whom it was not possible to contact in the time available, and this report does not claim to present a complete picture. While acknowledging the help of all the respondents to my enquiries, this report expresses only my views and I remain remains responsible for any errors of fact or interpretation.

Introduction

1. Zambia has been generous host to Angolan refugees since 1966 when the Angolan revolution against the Portuguese spread to the east of the country forcing people to flee for safety in neighbouring Zambia. By the end of the year there were nearly 4,000 Angolan refugees in Zambia's Western and North-Western Provinces and the Zambian government responded by establishing a settlement in each province: Mayukwayukwa in Western Province and Lwatembo in North Western. Both were designed as agricultural settlements where refugees were assigned plots of land and expected to be self-supporting. Lwatembo proved to be inappropriate and it was closed and the population was transferred to a new site at Meheba in 1971. Mayukwayukwa remains as the oldest refugee settlement in Africa.

2. The struggle for independence developed into a civil war between two of the liberation movements, the Movimento Popular da Libertaç=E3o de Angola (MPLA) and Uni=E3o Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola (UNITA). This conflict continued after the departure of the Portuguese in 1975 and the refugees in Zambia increased in number. Mayukwayukwa soon reached its full capacity of 4,000. Its population remained relatively static at that level for over twenty years until end of 1999 when the collapse of the 1994 Lusaka Protocol and the renewed fighting in the east of Angola resulted in the first mass influx of Angolan refugees into Zambia since the mid-1980s. By February 2000, over 6,000 new arrivals had been transferred to Mayukwayukwa taking the population over 10,000 and the population grew steadily to approximately 16,000 by the end of the year.

3. Among these new refugees were about 12,000 people who had fled when the Angolan government forces captured the UNITA headquarters which had been established Cuando-Cubango Province in south east Angola. Nearly all of these people had been working for UNITA, many under forced labour, and given their very marked political affiliation it was decided that they should kept separate from the other Angolan refugees in Zambia. A new refugee camp was established for them at Nangweshi on the west bank of the Zambezi River.

4. The continued military campaign in 2001 reached a peak towards the end of the year and there was a further large influx of new arrivals from October 2001 taking the populations of both Mayukwayukwa and Nangweshi over 20,000. Despite the death of the UNITA leader, Jonas Savimbi, in February 2002 and the rapid agreement of a ceasefire, refugees have continued to arrive in Zambia during this year. At the same time some have returned to Angola. The nominal population of Mayukwayukwa reached a peak of nearly 26,000 in May 2002 but a registration conducted in June brought the number down to 22,000. Nangweshi currently houses about 24,000 refugees.

5. With the new influxes of Angolan refugees into Zambia, the UNHCR's aid programme in the country has expanded enormously. Christian Outreach Relief and Development (CORD) is one of the new implementing partners who has started working in the programme since 2000 and it has responsibility for community services in Mayukwayukwa refugee settlement and Nangweshi refugee camp. This report presents the findings of a review of CORD's work in Zambia. After an introduction to CORD and description of terms of reference and methodology used in this review, the next two sections give the background to 'community services' and situation of refugees in Zambia. The following two sections give a description of the activities undertaken with the community services programmes and the refugees' perceptions of them. An analytical section draws on these findings from CORD's experience to present some of the challenges involved in implementing community services, before concluding the report.

Background to CORD in Zambia

6. Christian Outreach Relief and Development is a British NGO which has been working with refugees in Asia and Africa since 1971. The focus of its first work was in healthcare but in 1986 it started a community development programmes among Eritrean refugees in Sudan in response to the refugees' requests. Since then it has worked in what has now become known as 'community services' among Rwandan refugees in Tanzania and DR Congo (at the time Zaïre), and Burundian and Congolese refugees in Tanzania. In 2000 it started working in community services in Mayukwayukwa in response to the new influx of Angolan refugees. It expanded its work to take on responsibility for community services including education in Nangweshi refugee camp in June 2001.

7. At the outset of its work in Mayukwayukwa, CORD entered into partnership with Hodi, a Zambian development NGO which had previously expressed a desire to work with refugees. Through this partnership CORD hoped to benefit from the Hodi's Zambian experience and development perspective, and Hodi would gain exposure to work with refugees and to the requirements of operating as an implementing partner of UNHCR. CORD has remained the lead agency in Mayukwayukwa programme and Hodi has seconded staff to the programme and provided strategic inputs. In particular, Hodi facilitated the initial participatory rapid appraisal at the start of the programme and conducted an internal review at the end of 2001 to assess the progress against objectives¹. CORD will be withdrawing from Mayukwayukwa at the end of 2002 and Hodi will take over the community services programme. This partnership does not apply to the Nangweshi programme where CORD has been working on its own.

Terms of reference and methodology

8. This review was commissioned by UNHCR as a supplementary study to the overall global evaluation of UNHCR's community services function which is being conducted at the same time. The terms of reference contained five main points as follows:

• What have been the key policy and operational challenges CORD has faced, how have they been addressed?
  
  

• What has CORD's experience been in working as an implementing partner for UNHCR and with other NGOs?
  
  

• What restrictions if any has the government placed on CORD's work?
  
  

• How are the services which CORD provides perceived by the refugees - and to what extent have those services been planned and implemented on the basis of beneficiary participation?
  
  

• How has CORD interacted with the refugee leadership, and to what extent has the agency sought to establish new structures of community representation?

9. The emphasis of this review has been on understanding the refugees' perspectives of the community services programmes and this is reflected in the methods used. Ten days was spent at each field site and the majority of the time was spent talking to refugees. The main methods used were semi-structured interviews with key informants, focus group discussions and observation in the field. In order to get some sense of the coverage of CORD's work and to supplement the findings of other interviews a short questionnaire was prepared. In each location refugee interviewers (mostly students graduated from school) were hired to conduct interviews using the questionnaire in a random sample of 125 households within five of the villages or blocks across the settlement or camp.

10. Other stakeholders were interviewed in both locations and Lusaka. These included CORD staff (both Zambian and Angolan), the staff of other NGOs, the Government of Zambia refugee officers and UNHCR staff. In both Mayukwayukwa and Nangweshi, a workshop was arranged at the end of the review visit and preliminary findings were presented and discussed. Each workshop was attended by about thirty people, including refugee key informants and CORD staff.

11. In Mayukwayukwa the review took place during the week of World Refugee Day which demanded a lot of time from the community services staff and refugees. As a result it was difficult to spend much time with them until the refugee day was over. In Nangweshi, all the refugee field staff - the community development workers and reproductive health motivators - were involved in a training workshop for small business development during the review. As a result the only opportunity to discuss the programme with them was on the consultant's last day in the camp. There was also no Zambian reproductive health officer in post at the time and the programme co-ordinator who was managing the reproductive health was away for most of the review. As a result it was difficult to obtain full details of the reproductive health work in Nangweshi.

12. This review attempts to draw out lessons from CORD's experience in Zambia and the focus has been on learning rather than accountability and impact assessment. There has been no attempt systematically to review the programmes' progress against their stated objectives in each particular location. In order to avoid any confusion with the overall global evaluation of community services, this review limited the scope of its fieldwork quite tightly to the work of CORD.

Community services and community development

13. Before proceeding further, it is important to set out some of the basic ideas underlying community services within refugee camps. According to UNHCR's guidelines the goals of community services are 'to restore the refugees' humanity and dignity, to enable them to take decisions, to restore a sense of security, to create a sense of belonging and to rebuild a self-generating community.'² Through community services, the aid programme should ensure that 'physically, mentally or socially disadvantaged are able to meet their basic needs.'³ Throughout the guidelines stress the importance of using community based mechanisms for assessing needs, working through community structures to deliver assistance to those with special needs, and building up the capacity of the refugee community to address these issues. The guidelines describe seven basic principles for community services (see below), although some of these are assumptions rather than principles to which those involved in community services can aim to adhere.

UNHCR basic principles of community services⁴

Community Services activities are based on certain fundamental principles about human beings, they are:

i. The dignity and worth of individual human beings.

ii. The capacity of persons to change no matter how desperate their situation.

iii. Inherent desire of all human beings to belong to and contribute to a larger supportive community.

iv. Every person has a right to live a full human life, and to improve his circumstances.

v. Persons are entitled to help when they are unable to help themselves. vi. Others have a duty to help those who are unable to help themselves. vii. The ultimate goal of community services is self-help.

14. Drawing on its own experience in the field, CORD has developed a set of principles and basic guidelines for running community services programmes with refugees (see below).

15. These are consistent with UNHCR's community service guidelines. According to CORD's Community Services Handbook:

The role of community services programmes is to encourage strong, self-supporting and self respecting communities, which lead to a sense of stability and security. This is achieved by facilitating people to find solutions to the problems they face and by encouraging community led initiatives that will lead to self-generating communities. In addition, there is emphasis on the community to respond to the needs of its most vulnerable members.

CORD's community services programmes are based on a community development approach which has the broad goal of helping communities to work together in taking initiatives which will improve their economic and social situation. In addition, it is the aim of CORD to encourage others working with and supporting refugees to recognise and build on the capacities of refugees to manage their own lives. In this way, Community Services need not necessarily be seen as a separate sector but can guide and inform other sectors in the approach to the community.

Rather than establishing specific programmes for different sections of the community, the community is seen as a whole and CORD endeavours to monitor its activities to ensure that all are included in the scope of the programme. Activities according to gender or age may develop, but only if the community sets that direction. At the same time, CORD recognises the role it has to integrate measures to protect women and children and to develop rights awareness in all programme activities.⁵

Summary of CORD's principles and guidelines for good practice in community services⁶

• Refugees should be approached as people with great potential, inherent capacity and gifts.
  
  

• Attitudes of respect, trust, and rapport with the community should be an integral part of CORD's work.
  
  

• Openness and transparency is crucial for building trust and partnership with the refugee population, the local community, other agencies and the host government.
  
  

• Since all refugee situations have a wider political, economic and environmental context. Before any intervention we need to be aware of how refugee programmes connect socially, politically, economically and environmentally to host communities and to the wider picture.
  
  

• In most cases, where community structures and community organisation pre exist and are equitable, CORD will aim to strengthen them.
  
  

• Programme activities are developed after a participatory appraisal to discover structures, relationships, existing skills, knowledge and priorities in the refugee community.
  
  

• Refugees should actively participate in prioritising needs, planning, developing managing and monitoring programmes. Techniques need to ensure the widest range of community voices are heard in this process.
  
  

• Participatory methodologies which encourage creative thinking, problem solving, learning and action at all levels of the community are an essential part of a community services programme.
  
  

• Refugee populations should be trusted with decisions concerning their own lives and refugee communities not agencies should be encouraged to take the lead in deciding what initiatives will take place.
  
  

• It is necessary to ensure that physically, mentally or socially disadvantaged refugees meet adequately their daily and special needs. Where possible, the ability of individuals to meet their own needs should be respected or these needs should be met within communities in which they live.
  
  

• Community initiatives that encourage enterprise, develop skills, provide extra income and resources and build a sense of hope for the future should be encouraged.
  
  

• Participatory monitoring and regular evaluation is built into all programmes.

16. Over the last year a similar 'community development approach' has been adopted as a formal policy by UNHCR in all of its activities. This approach aims at:

• Strengthening refugee's initiative and partnership, resulting in ownership of all phases of programme implementation;
  
  

• Reinforcing dignity, self-esteem of refugees and persons of concern to UNHCR;
  
  

• Achieving a higher degree of self-reliance; and
  
  

• Increasing cost effectiveness and sustainability of UNHCR's programmes.⁷

17. However, as the paper presented to UNHCR's Executive Committee in 2001 recognises, 'a generalised application of the community development approach will take time and require some adjustments of attitudes within the organization.'⁸

18. In the field there is wide range of ideas of what the responsibilities of the community services agencies are. In the report from the PRA for Mayukwayukwa, one of the key challenges facing the community services programmes was outlined:

How will the two organizations [CORD and Hodi] ensure that even those without relatives are taken care of by the community within which they live? The community members expect NGOs to provide help while NGOs expect the vulnerables to be taken care of by the community. The real challenge is how to bridge or reconcile the variance in expectations.⁹

19. At one extreme, some expect community services to take care of any social needs that arise within the camps, giving out materials and moving through the camp looking after individuals who cannot manage to look after themselves. During this review this appeared to the most common view among other agencies, government and UNHCR, perhaps even more than among the refugees. At the other extreme, a community development approach suggests that the role of the agency is one of facilitating the refugees' in looking after themselves.

20. It is important to stress that community development is a slow process. In a stable village one would not hope to achieve much in less than three years starting from a base of a neighbourhood of people who already know each other, expect to remain in the same place for some years and without the arrival of large numbers of newcomers. CORD has been operating in Mayukwayukwa for just over two years and Nangweshi for one year. Not surprisingly given the changing situation of the refugee camps, it is still undertaking a lot of 'social welfare' work - directly assisting people by distributing materials - and the community development work is still in its infancy.

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Footnotes:

¹ Hodi (2001) Report on Internal End of Year Review for the Mayukwayukwa Refugee Settlement

² UNHCR (1996) Refugee Emergencies: A community based approach. Community Service Guidelines Volume 1. Geneva: UNHCR, p. 13

³ ibid, p. 42

⁴ UNHCR (1996) Refugee Emergencies: A community based approach. Community Service Guidelines Volume 1. Geneva: UNHCR, p. 9

⁵ CORD (2001), Community Services Handbook, draft January 2001, p 3

⁶ ibid, p. 4.

⁷ UNHCR (2001) Reinforcing a Community Development Approach. EC/51/SC/CRP.6. Geneva: 20th Executive Committee, UNHCR.

⁸ ibid

⁹ Hodi (2000) Participatory Assessment Report: Mayukwayukwa Refugee Settlement, Kaoma District, Western Province, p. 9