Since 2006, ICE has worked with four communities to bring back learning spaces traditionally used to impart essential societal values in young people. These spaces have since colonial times been replaced by formal schools and new faiths. Our experience when working with these communities is that young people are struggling to identify who they are since they do not understand their roots and they are not fitting perfectly in the new western world view. They have resorted to looking for their identity in crime, illicit sex and drug abuse. If they fail to proceed with education after basic primary and secondary levels, they gang up against their own communities.

ICE worked with elders (both men and women) to revive indigenous learning spaces for boys and girls where boys were mentored by their fathers and girls their mothers. ICE has targeted households and fronts the view that communities are groupings of households and so for community reconstruction to happen, it has to start with re-building and strengthening households. Traditional governance structures have become very important in holding this process. In two of the target areas, the local councils of elders have been revived and the spaces for local learning strengthened. Also, men and women have been provided with opportunities to meet and rediscover their responsibility-based roles as providers and mentors of their children first before the wider community comes in.

Men have gone back to the farms and contributed immensely in working at the farms to produce food for the households. Traditionally men had their own crops different from women. The ICE approach is to encourage men to produce their traditional crops and women as well. Since these crops are different, the end result is that such households end up getting different varieties of crops that in some instances has been enough to feed them for twelve calendar months. As they do this, men and women are walking with the youth who are learning from their parents.

This process is kindling interest in the young people who are now accompanying their parents to the farms to learn and support their parents in household food production. Parents are also taking advantage of these opportunities to share their knowledge of local crops and societal values with their children and thereby contribute in shaping the growth of their children. It is only when parents and their children work together in mutual respect that strong households are moulded. Strong households are the building blocks of strong communities.