We all love a good story of giving and the tale of Kate Frykberg and Dave Moskovitz’s gifts to Bright Kifita’s Fluent Zambia is an excellent one. Because so much of the work being funded to Fluent Zambia through The Gift Trust involves the possession of our own words, our own languages, we’re including Kate and Bright’s own words here as they both know best how to tell their own tale.
Kate: I first met Bright Kifita, a historian and the founder of Fluent Zambia, several years ago as part of my journey to understand and make amends for some difficult colonial events in the early 20th century in Northwest Zambia in which my family had been involved. Through Fluent Zambia, we were guided through this journey, and were able to support three excellent local projects. These involved Kaonde language revitalisation via dictionary building and a mother tongue essay competition for children, a community water bore in a village where collecting fresh water had previously involved walking over a kilometre, and a historical plaque to commemorate the place where lives were lost in the events above – there is another long story there! Suffice it to say that our connection with Fluent Zambia has been a profound journey of reconciliation, for which I am very grateful.
Bright: Fluent Zambia is a Zambian nonprofit whose goal is to help preserve our indigenous languages, which face extinction partly due to a lack of literature. We began an initiative to create local language databases, and use those databases to develop local language dictionaries. This work requires many resources, so we started with one language called Kikaonde.
We were so delighted to receive a donation from Kate Frykberg and Dave Moskovitz. This helped us buy some computers and dictionary software, to teach children story writing and to be a part of the International Mother Language Day celebrations. Without the donation, all of this would have been an uphill climb.
As mentioned above, Kate and Dave also supported two projects in a rural district. This community is very grateful for these gifts, and it was a privilege for us to be used in reaching these communities.
Fluent Zambia is now preparing for the 2024 children’s project, where we will teach more children to write stories in their mother tongues, and their stories will be recorded as short audiobooks and published on our website for other children to listen to.
For the dictionary project, our current needs include office equipment, namely a printer and two laptops for our data entry volunteers. We would also appreciate funding to help pay for the many hours our volunteers spend on the project.
Kate: In general, I think that it is very important to consider the impacts of colonisation and our own privilege when donating money, and, even if I had not had family connections to Zambia, I would be keen to support Fluent Zambia. Why? Because the organisation is Zambian founded, Zambian run and works on projects which are important to Zambians – not projects which Westerners have decided that Africa needs. We have huge respect and admiration for the work of Fluent Zambia.
Bright: We are grateful to Kate and Dave for their generosity, and for the wonderful relationship that has resulted. They have made what matters to us, matter to them.
The Gift Trust: Now, that’s a story. We were so pleased to be the conduit for Kate and Dave’s giving to Fluent Zambia and others. If you’d like to learn more about Fluent Zambia or make a gift to meet some of their current funding gap, drop us a line at and we’ll help you make it happen. Read more about the advantages of our international giving service and examples here.
