Focusing on the real issues

Our programmes fall within four main focus areas: community development [including crisis relief], care of the most vulnerable members of the community – women, children, youth and the aged; health and nutrition; and economic development.

Community development
Central to our work are the eight Community Development Centres located in severely disadvantaged areas of the Western Cape. These centres are the channels through which we deliver our interventions to promote health, nutrition, child care, youth programmes, support for abused women and children and capacity building. For more about the Community Development Centres, please click here.

Women, children & youth
This focus area prioritises interventions towards the most vulnerable members of society: namely women and their children. The main challenges faced by these groups include lack of knowledge and lack of resources.

The Women’s programme cluster is unique in that it focuses on the most marginalised women: refugees and homeless women. These projects include the children, and other family members, providing a safety net to support the basic shelter, nutritional, educational, emotional and spiritual needs of the clients.

CWD’s Early Childhood Development (ECD) is a critical intervention that complements the government’s ECD programme. CWD assists community-based initiatives with child care to the point where they are formally registered with the Department of Social Development and receive financial support.

Health and nutrition
This focus area addresses the needs of the most vulnerable members of our society: the young, the elderly, the sick, the unemployed and the destitute, for basic nutrition and health care.

Our models of intervention have been honed over many years, placing CWD in a position to work in partnership with others to implement our models over a wider scale in order to have a wider impact. We encourage communities to take ownership of the initiative at all times.

Economic Development
According to key findings from the Labour Force Survey (LFS) conducted in September 2006, the rate of unemployment in South Africa now stands at a staggering 25.5 %. Over a quarter of all South Africans do not have work, nor an income.

This startling fact forms the foundation of the CWD Economic Development Programme, which focuses on providing men and women, especially the youth, with the skills to better their lives.