alexanderchisango

Since the mid-90s, Alexander Chisango has built a grassroots faith-based socio-economic empowerment movement starting in Zimbabwe and spreading in Africa, on the basis that for sustainable socio-economic progress, all development efforts should place the family unit at the center of thinking, concern and action; and family friendly community empowerment of both sexes is the core of secure and enterprising families and communities.
Alexander wants to see sustainable and integrated empowerment of the family in a way leading to lasting and positive community transformation.
Alexander passionately wants to see families once again empowered to recover their God given right and responsibility to be primary vehicles for deciding on and implementing the empowerment of families and communities, since the consequences of any person's failure or success affects or rewards the family first ahead of all other constituencies.
Alexander Chisango has introduced a new type of integrated socio-economic development strategy restoring and affirming the family as the center for engineering sustainable progress, empowerment and development in Zimbabwe and in other vulnerable communities. Alexander believes that conventional governmental and private donor driven "development interventions" neither take into account the central role of the family in anchoring society and bearing the consequences of any dysfunctional society, nor offer viable alternatives.

According to Alexander, most problems faced by society and governments could be eased or eliminated if families could be empowered as basic units for consideration and implementation of social and economic development. Having begun as Abundant Life Trust in 1994, in 1998 he launched the Pan-African Family Empowerment Foundation (PAFEF) to envision and organise communities for integrated and family driven empowerment, and in 2000 he set up the Jubilee Empowerment Trust (or JET) to provide practical technical support to achieve the desired empowerment. This was during the rise of nationwide hard times arising from a combination of the IMF/World Bank driven economic structural adjustment programme (ESAP) as well as the ensuing economic, social and political conflict in Zimbabwe. JET provides the working model, resource materials, and empowerment training courses - all aimed at helping families and communities to overcome economic, social, mental, civic and spiritual vulnerability and in the midst of hard times.

The PAFEF-JET strategy is thus equipping vulnerable communities without discrimination to establish empowerment networks at various levels, assess their problems and causes, identify the solutions, develop project ideas and then directly organize resources to implement, monitor and review their "integrated empowerment projects" as families, groups and communities, facilitated through JET trained and JET resourced Christian technical volunteers and project officers based in churches, villages, townships, schools, colleges and universities. The empowerment projects enable participating families, groups and communities to create own jobs and income, businesses, food security, nutrition and better health, life skills, spiritual sustenance, fight HIV & AIDS at the same time enabling families to build sustainable communities as well as directly represent themselves at all policy-making levels.

In the program, Alexander also mainstreams environmental improvement and gender and empowerment concepts. He notes and has witnessed that conventional concepts of family, which place men solely in the role of "breadwinner" and women in the role of "mandatory homemaker" only make families socio-economically vulnerable, failing to positively utilize the mutual capabilities in the two genders. He believes that holistic reformation of people from man made dysfunctional stereotypes will strengthen the bonds between husbands and wives and help them build better families and communities. Deeply respectful of women's aspirations for education and inter-dependent livelihood, Alexander defines the goal of PAFEF and JET as "organizing and equipping of vulnerable households, groups and communities to sustainably empower themselves in an integrated way and without discrimination.