Children’s Feedback Committees in Zimbabwe: An Experiment in Humanitarian Accountability

This publication chronicles the attempt by Save the Children (UK) to set up an accountability project, related to the agency’s food aid intervention in Zimbabwe that would address some of the issues raised above. From its conception in mid-2003, to the setting up of the project and final evaluation in May 2004, a key intention was to set up a mechanism that specifically included children in the process of creating better accountability towards communities. The focus on children was informed by several considerations. Despite the fact that food aid interventions were meant to address the needs of vulnerable children there had been little attempt to solicit their constructive involvement either in the design, implementation or evaluation of the programme. In other words the agency was largely dependent on the community leadership having the interests of children at heart, despite previous evidence that this could never be taken for granted. In an evaluation conducted some years previously
by the organisation in the same operational areas where food was being distributed, children had previously complained that the siting of wells and boreholes donated by the agency had often been prioritised in terms of their proximity to beer halls rather than to schools, clinics and homesteads. This was a decision, they claimed, motivated by a desire among some influential community members to have a regular supply of beer rather than have clean water for women and children to wash with and maintain proper family hygiene.