MORE than 3 000 children under the age of 16 benefited from the registration blitz that was initiated by Government in Tsholotsho last year after they were identified by community Child Care Workers.
The Ministry of Public Service, Labour and Social Welfare, in collaboration with Unicef, identified care workers and trained them on how best they could help mobilise different community members who had children that had no birth certificates to get them. The Government of Sweden provided funding.
A Chronicle crew spoke to some child care workers in Tsholotsho’s Mvundlana Village who said they are happy with how they managed to help so many children get identity documents.
One of the care workers, Mrs Magret Nyathi, said she has been a care worker for the past 35 years and in the last years she has always focused on taking care of abused children and reporting such cases to the social welfare department.
She said because she loves working with children, ensuring that they are well taken care of, she did not hesitate to join the training that was being facilitated by the Ministry of Public Service so that she could help identify children who did not have identity documents and ensure that they get all the required documents.
“We were trained sometime last year on how to deal with different people and how families could be advised into getting identity documents for a child. Because families are different some were more difficult than others and one would have to be patient and apply all the lessons we were given so that at the end of the day the child gets the documents,” said Mrs Nyathi.
Another care worker, Mrs Smangele Ndebele said she helped more than 35 children get their identity documents.
She said most children who did not have the documents were either orphans or were born outside the country and left in the care of family members without any documents.
Mrs Ndebele said they would walk from homestead to homestead in different villages telling people about the mobile registration exercise that was going to be taking place and for how long it was going to be there for.
“Our job was to inform people about the registration blitz that the Government was doing and convince those families that seem to be reluctant on getting their children documentation.
“It was however, not easy because the Ministry of Public Service does not have any cars so it meant we had to walk from one point to another and that alone is difficult considering the distance that is there between villages,” she said.
Apart from the children under the age of 16, more than 600 adults were also able to get documents and more than 50 death certificates were issued during the blitz.
The director of social development in the Ministry of Public Service, Labour and Social Welfare, Mr Tawanda Zimhunga said child care workers working with social workers identified groups that were in remote areas and needed transport to reach registration centres and this is what made it possible for many to get identity documents. – The Chronicle
