Popular Education Collective (PEC) - Zimbabwe

PEC has published books on training and civic education as well as a bi-monthly magazine on the same topics. The organisation conducted training in business management for community groups and ran a rural mobile library scheme.

In its current civic education programme PEC is conducting community -based workshops in Masvingo and Manicaland. The workshops are on good governance, choosing effective leaders, citizen participation, non-violence and tolerance, transparency and accountability. In the first year of its programme (2000) there will be 24 community-based workshops. Followed by 48 in 2001 and the same number in 2002. Civic education materials such as posters, leaflets, T-shirts, stickers etc. will be produced on the above topics.

A monthly electronic version of Read On magazine will be launched. This will be connected to rural focal points. The rural focal points will print the text version of the publication and disseminate it to the organisation's constituency as described in this proposal.

Political Development.

The organisation intends to lobby government and other stakeholders, through networks that it is part of, on the need for civic education in Zimbabwe and its recognition as an important ingredient to the country's development. The stakeholders will include the community, civil society, the private sector, donors and government ministries. In the civil society groups the stakeholders will be NGOs community based organisations, farmers associations, churches, women's and youth groups, political parties, consumer groups etc. In the community the programme targets villagers, the unemployed, farm and rural workers, traditional leaders such as village heads and informal leaders.

As civic organisation, PEC would like to play a key role in the way governance develops in Zimbabwe especially making it more inclusive to the needs of ordinary men and women. Among other things, PEC would like to act as a mediator between conflicting interests and nurture citizen values that are a prerequisite for democracy to prevail.