Dalton State College professor conducts research in Zambia

Submitted by Dalton State College

For a number of children in Zambia, many of whom are infected with HIV/AIDS, social service agencies have provided food and resources that their parents have come to view as a lifeline.

Basically, hundreds of infants may have died without it.

“Over a five-year period, more than 225 infants have been served through a community feeding and medicine program, and several social workers and child welfare experts recently spent 10 days in Zambia studying the impact that the program had on the children and their families,” said Jane Wimmer, child welfare specialist for the School of Social Work at Dalton State College and team leader for the project.

The project began about 18 months ago when Wimmer, invited by a friend and colleague employed by Michigan-based Bethany Christian Services, made her first trip to Zambia. While there, she and Awtrey Harrington provided training for the social service organization Christian Alliance for Children in Zambia (CACZ), a program of the American-based Alliance for Children Everywhere. Through subsequent meetings with UNICEF, Wimmer learned that there were five years worth of data on the agency’s Milk and Medicine Program in Zambia.

“We wanted to gain access to that data,” said Wimmer, “to look at the impact these types of programs have on the families benefiting from the program and to see the correlation between successful participation in the program and the growth and welfare of the children.”

Available quantitative data included five years of records charting the number of times children were given food, the quantity of food, and how the children’s weight patterns fluctuated. But Wimmer also wanted to include qualitative data on how the program impacted the families beyond the facts told by the numbers.

“Although UNICEF was not able to fund the project, we were able to secure funding for our research through the AMWAY Foundation,” she said. “So I went back this April with a research team of five American and six Zambian social workers and child welfare specialists.”

“We conducted 51 interviews, in 10 days, in four languages,” said Wimmer. “We hired four local research assistants to do the family interviews and a number of CACZ staff helped us as well. We interviewed families caring for infants, community stakeholders, and staff of the agency.”

Wimmer describes the whole process as “pretty amazing.”

“Minibuses brought in families and their children to be interviewed at about 8:30 each morning, and some had spent two or three hours traveling to get to us,” she said. “The staff of CACZ fed them breakfasts and we asked them to tell us about their experience with the program.”

Through the interviews several themes emerged, Wimmer noted, including the fact that HIV/AIDS was a major problem.

“A huge number of families were impacted by AIDS, which frequently results in children becoming orphans or double orphans. Mothers who are HIV positive cannot safely breast-feed. And there were also many multiple births, twins and triplets, which impacts a mothers’ ability to breast-feed successfully. Of course, poverty was a factor in all cases.”

Wimmer said she and Deborah Sturtevant, the co-investigator from Hope College in Michigan, expect that the process of analyzing the data should be completed in August. They will also examine the strengths and weaknesses of the program, and will make recommendations about whether it should be replicated in Ethiopia and Haiti.

Based on the experience in Zambia, Wimmer expects that the program will be viewed as a success.

“Although we only asked for 20 families to come for the interviews, we ended up with 22. CACZ gave them a gift bag of beans, cooking oil, and cornmeal for participating, but that’s not why they came. Basically they came because they were grateful to have been in the program.

“One grandmother, whose family has been devastated by AIDS, probably said it best. About her grandson, she said, ‘Before he started the Milk and Medicine Program, he was sick and very thin ... At one time, I thought he was going to die. I lost hope that he was going to live because his parents left him (both died) when he was a very small, tiny baby. I was full of fear. I didn’t know what to do ... but now he is big and active, and he is healthy now.’”