It has been proven over and over again that a child is profoundly influenced by the family and the community within which they live and grow. Therefore any intervention/project/program that aims to meaningfully impact on a young child for a lifetime, has to make every effort to facilitate for the family and community within which children learns and develop to also be improved. And DEDI is an organisation that encourages and supports local communities to invent and implement such inventions/programs/projects.

DEDI (Diketso Eseng Dipuo Community Development Trust), is an organisation that has since its establishment been working with families and local organisations, empowering and strengthening them to improve and to better care for young children.

We believe in empowering people to do things for themselves. We do not and have refused for more than 10 years to do things for people. In DEDI we use the word ‘empower’ very carefully; to us ‘empowering’ is a process and not an event and the process involves:

• Causing local people and local organisations to sit and spend time reading/examining their surrounding
• Identify and state the problem/concerns/constraints/needs that affects them and their progressExplore what are causes the problem (human, materials, etc)
• Design and fashion plans/strategies they can engage to solve those problems (variety of plans and strategies)
• Identify resources they already possess and resources they will need to enable them to act to bring about change
• Make choices on actions they are going to take from a menu of alternative problem solving strategies they
  developed
• Implement the plan they chose

We believe when people and their organisations are empowered, change has happened and will continue happening. To facilitate for change within the lives of young children, DEDI has been empowering families and local organisations. This we have been doing by means of:

• Conducting workshops that provide enabling information to local community based organisations related to family wellbeing and child development
• Assist local community based organisations to access funding and other support by connecting them to institutions and companies that can assist them
• Providing ongoing support, mentoring local community organisations to services families and children