We’ve spent the last few days, together with our partner organisations here in Zambia, exploring tools and methods for tracking the progress of the orphans and vulnerable children we support in school and college, and what is helping and hindering them in achieving their full potential. The highlight was a lively "monitoring tools marketplace"(left) where, with much haggling, we bought and sold cardboard cutouts representing the tools. These were made out of scrap from a recycling depot in Oxford, and will now become toys for children at Bwafwano Community School. Which is where we started our workshop.

Bwafwano Community Homebased Care Centre's buildings - painted deep blue - are ranged on three sides of a courtyard where the school children play, fight, sing and dance in between their lessons. It’s also where those that Bwafwano supports in government school (with Cecily’s Fund’s help), come to collect their new uniforms and shoes. These precious items are received with enormous joy and excitement. One boy was literally dancing with happiness, pulling up the legs of his new trousers to show off his new shoes!

The buildings house an HIV and TB screening point, a clinic, a laboratory (for blood and other health tests), a home-based care centre, a sewing skills training room, a food storeroom, a co-ordination centre for orphans and vulnerable children, and a “play therapy” room where traumatised bereaved children receive counselling. It also houses the classrooms and cooking area where 756 children are fed and taught in shifts by four teachers and a pre-school matron. The community school, teachers’ salaries and school lunches are funded by Cecily’s Fund.

Our session began with a monitoring tool called a “transect walk”. In small groups we walked through the community centre – and out into the community itself - each focusing on a different area of support it provides for the children and their families. We carefully observed the surroundings, drew maps, and interviewed Bwafwano staff and their clients – patients, school children, etc.

We observed the shape of the Bwafwano complex, like open arms welcoming the community, not judging them if they are HIV positive, but offering every service they need all in one place. Outside, we observed little stalls selling soap, guavas, tomatoes and fritters outside people's houses. One little girl selling guavas under tree was busy texting someone on her mobile phone.

We noted the exceptionally well integrated web of services run by very professional and dedicated staff, supported by a network of volunteers from the community itself. These resilient women and men take time out from the relentless work of surviving poverty to help those who are in even worse situations than themselves.

One of these volunteers discovered a family of three young orphans who had been abandoned by their grandmother, unable to cope with the pressures of trying to care for them. The volunteer informed Bwafwano who sent their Orphan and Vulnerable Children Co-ordinator, Eddie Muswa, to visit them. Eddie arranged for the youngest, let’s call him Nathan, to go into a transit home for orphans while they built them a new house (the old, mud house their grandmother had left them in was not secure or healthy).

When we visited, the family was living in a small but clean and secure little house, with a separate latrine block. An extra room with its own entrance had been built so the family could supplement its income by renting it out. The house was surrounded by greenery, maize, guava trees, even decorative plants in plastic cooking oil containers. Granny came back once the house was built and now earns an income for them selling guavas, maize and building materials – sand and stone - from her plot.

Nathan is a bright, articulate boy who enthusiastically enriched our map with pictures of football pitches, his family (including his elder brother who was then at Bwafwano’s clinic), the road to his school and the nearest water source. He described one of the football pitches where he plays with his friends as being close to "Amai Chola's" house. Mrs Chola is the local nurse who set Bwafwano up in 1992. Amai means mother. And for the whole community Bwafwano is indeed like a caring, nurturing, affectionate yet strict parent. Strict because in return for its care, it expects the community not to marry their daughters off at 15, it expects them to send children to school and not overburden them with house or market work, expects them to immunise their children and to feed them nourishing local foodstuffs from the market.

It might be my imagination, but Chazanga market looks more prosperous than when I first visited in 2008. If it is true, I would not be at all surprised to find that it is because Bwafwano's children are growing up stronger, healthier and more able to earn themselves a living.