New Development Role for Culture Fund of Zimbabwe Trust, PEPFAR and DREAMS Partners Announce Winners of the $85 Million DREAMS Innovation Challenge
The Culture Fund is a non-profit organization. Founded in June 2006, it has played an active change agent role for over 1,000 creative projects within Zimbabwe; shifted many mindsets, strengthen CBOs capacities, empowered women and helped improve livelihoods and rights awareness. A unique enabler within society, it has enhanced Zimbabwe’s creative capacities by investing in actions that infuse creativity and innovation into community and national development strategies.
Anchored in the creative sector, it is an enabler and catalytic development organization that is comparatively advantaged to drive solutions that harness the power resident in this sector. Through multi-stakeholder collaborations that have included a variety of community based organizations (CBOs), it has developed an array of organizational capabilities for tackling complex and sensitive human development issues.
Through different development strategies and programmes, the Culture Fund has in the past partnered with the Swedish Government through the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida), the Danish Government through the Danish International Development Agency (DANIDA) and the European Union (EU) Delegation in Harare, targeted Zimbabwe government departments, the corporate sector, UNESCO, UNDP, Hivos, GIZ, and South Planet among others. They helped it change the lives of ordinary Zimbabweans. Its Culture Impacts programme (2015-2016) supported 86 creative projects and activities impacting over 20,000 people in selected communities.
Over the last 10 years, Culture Fund programmes partnerships have demonstrated that there are different avenues to change the human development pathway, especially involving women and young people. In an effort to improve its attribution towards changing the lives of ordinary Zimbabweans within focused areas of need, the Fund has consolidated its programme-focused approaches for its development interventions.
The Culture Fund is proud to be recognized by its new international partners, The DREAMS Partnership, who announced at the recently ended International AIDS Conference in Durban that it has been selected as a DREAMS Innovation Challenge Winner! Out of a pool of more than 800 ideas from 27 countries, the Culture Fund’s creative-sector focused solution for the Zimbabwe cultural context, was selected to infuse new thinking and high-impact approaches to empower adolescent girls and young women in 10 sub-Saharan African countries to live HIV-free. Culture Fund congratulates and joins a network of development innovators helping confront global problems! Learn more at www.dreamschallenge.org.