Responding to COVID-19 Challenges - Africa & India

As Covid-related restrictions ease across the world, we are happy to see activities at our partner organisations resume and we are pleased to be back in the office more and to see our volunteers more active with local events too. It is too soon to think it is all over though, especially with low vaccination levels in the communities we work with.

In addition, the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic continues to be felt. For example, at our partner school in India, pupil numbers are much lower than pre-pandemic levels. It will take a lot of work to encourage families to send their children back to school and to help children catch up on the education they have missed. This is an issue for many children around the world and the reason it was so important for our partners to maintain contact with the children during the school closures. For example, Killian, Project Manager at Pizz school in Zambia, tells us about a pupil there: “Mike was supposed to be in grade 6 but all last year the boy was out of class from the time the schools closed due to Covid-19 in December 2020, the boy went back in streets but last week [2022], we managed to bring him back to school but he has had to go back into grade 5 – these are some of the bad results of Corona.”

We have maintained close communication with our partners throughout the pandemic, but it is hard to replace a project visit with a Zoom call. As such, I am delighted to be able to travel to Zambia next week to visit our partners there and I look forward to reporting back on my trip. We also hope to restart our overseas volunteering programme soon.

Thanks to our generous supporters, HATW has been able to adapt and respond effectively both in terms of helping our partners and developing our UK operations. The need to move to remote working fast tracked the improvements we were making with our IT and systems. We are working much more efficiently now making use of hybrid working and benefitting from a new CRM for managing data and cloud-based accounting software. All this was made possible with volunteer help and donations both monetary and in kind (laptops, mobile phones etc). We also have a new Grants Manager in post now, bringing the HATW staff team to four.

Alongside our partners, volunteers, and supporters, we are excited about what we will be able to achieve over the coming months and years. You can read our new strategy here.

Thank you for standing with us through these difficult times. Your support is vital for the children and communities we work with.