Children’s Homes in Dilemma With 18-year Olds, Govt to Enroll Them into Nat Youth Service

Children’s homes administrators in Zimbabwe have asked the government to come up with mechanisms to adopt and empower youth that would have reached 18 years of age and weaned out of child care homes.

The government has no clear solution to deal with them in the meantime.

Many of these children end up being homeless and into drug and substance abuse after their release. DAPP Zimbabwe Country Director Luckson Soda, speaking at Ponesai Vanhu Children’s Home, a subsidy of DAPP, said, “We are appealing for government assistance on these youths, some of them have nowhere to go.

“It is very painful to just release these youths without them knowing their destination.”

Child care homes in Zimbabwe take care of children of different backgrounds, some are orphans, some were picked from blair toilets and nobody knows their parents, while others were picked in the streets.

They take care of them up to the time they reach 18 years and then release them. Due to their backgrounds, some of these youths return to street life again.

However, Youth Deputy Minister (MP) Kudakwashe Mupamhanga said, these youths starting soon will be enrolled on the National Youth Service (Border Gezi) training so that they can be imparted with life skills that can sustain them.

“We are in the process of re-introducing the National Youth Service and hope to take these youths on board so that they can be indoctrinated with the tenets of ubuntu so that they love their country and defend it.

“They will also be trained in different life skills at our vocational training centres so that they can stand on their own,”  he said.

He went on to encourage youths to take practical courses that he said are helpful even when one is not employed.

“You can always earn a living with these courses, take a look at what happened during the Covid-19 induced lockdown era, all white jobs except for a few were halted. However, those who were doing practical jobs such as building, agriculture, and carpentry did not stop. These are courses we would want these youths to take, “he said.

Meanwhile, there was joy at Ponesai Vanhu Children’s Home last Tuesday after a South African company in transport and road logistics, Instatoll Pvt Ltd donated more than 1500kg of chicken feed. The company adopted the children’s home in 2021 and ever since has been donating groceries to the home every December.

For the past two years, Instatoll has been donating food stuffs every Christmas however, according to its Human Resources Manager Unwait Nyuruka, that had to change.

“We saw that we could not keep on providing them with foodstuffs and decided to sponsor a layers project here.

“We gave them 100 chicks some few months ago. The layers have already started laying and they can now sell them for some earnings as well as eat some during the Christmas and New Year season as they enjoy,” said Nyuruka.