About Us- Who we are

Inspire Zambia clg is a registered Irish charity working to alleviate poverty and to improve education in Zambia.

It is our aim to work with Zambians to help them to improve their own lives and their own country. We work closely with our Zambian brothers and sisters to this end. We listen to what we are told and we take their advice, rather than imposing solutions from outside.

Inspire Zambia works in Ireland, to raise funds, to recruit volunteers and to collect materials which are not available in Zambia. We work and plan and organise, together with our Zambian partners, to implement strategies and programmes in Zambia which will advance our joint aims. We lead a team of volunteers from Ireland to Zambia every summer, to work in our projects in Zambia.

Alleviating poverty
Together with our Zambian friends, we have come up with a few practical projects to help to lift people out of poverty. We have a small micro-finance project to give small loans to widows and business people seeking to establish a small business, such as dress making, chicken rearing or cement-block making. That initiative was immediately very successful in bringing a significant number of widows and their families out of poverty, permanently. We also conduct workshops, run by Irish volunteers, in basic business skills and financial skills for business people. We have established an Enterprise Centre in Ndola where people starting off in business can come together for mentorship, support and access to tools and raw materials, so that they can found a stable small business.

Assisting Education with books, bookshelves and laptop computers
Education is the long-term way to defeat poverty. When we discovered that most schools in Zambia had no books, and there were no bookshops or libraries within hundreds of miles of Ndola, we started supplying books and teaching materials from Ireland to Zambia. We provided books and teaching materials and laptop computers to many schools around Ndola which, up until then, had no access to books or such materials. We have sent four 40-foot steel shipping containers, each containing over 20 tons of books, to Zambia which have been converted into public libraries, where anyone can come to read. We have recently completed the construction of a large, purpose-built library building, which is now our flagship education project in Chipulukusu. We have also helped to set up computer labs in several schools so as to assist in computer learning, and we have laptop computers in our container-libraries, which are available to lend to local schools who wish to learn IT skills.

Volunteer trips to Zambia
Having delivered a huge stock of books, we quickly found that many Zambian teachers were unused to working with books and were not trained in the teaching of reading and literacy. Therefore, since 2018 we have brought out teams of Irish teachers and educational psychologists and held teachers’ training conferences to train Zambian teachers in the best means of making use of the books, computers and educational materials supplied. This is an ongoing effort which requires volunteers to travel out to Zambia every year. Each volunteer trip to Zambia takes place in August, when Zambian teachers are out of school, and so available to attend our training conferences.

All of our volunteers raise funds and pay their own way, so that none of the money raised in Ireland for our projects is used to cover volunteers’ expenses. During their time in Zambia, all volunteers live in Chipulukusu, in the same houses as our neighbours, which means without electricity or running water, showers or toilets or furniture. Our food is cooked over a charcoal fire and we sleep on the floor under mosquito nets.

Inspire Zambia Company Limited by Guarantee is an Irish registered charity, registered as a company limited by guarantee in Dublin, with CRO number 748852 and having its registered office at 6 Sandford Road, Ranelagh, Dublin 6, D06 A2P4, Ireland. Our Registered Charity Number (RCN) is 20206645 and our CHY number is 23113. Directors; Ciara Brenner, Noel Candon, John McDonnell, Anna Nugent, Michael Nugent.

Donate, volunteer or help?
If you can donate funds or resources (such as books, book shelves school tables or chairs or laptop computers) or volunteer, please contact us .