Where we fund: Africa
Kenyan Orphan Project (KOP)
KOP was founded in 2001 by three medical students at Nottingham University who were committed to improving the lives of orphans and vulnerable children. The three founders started with a group of students who raised the money to convert an old hotel into a hospital. They then travelled to Kenya to help with the building and to learn about developing world health care and education.
Camfed
Camfed began in 1993 by putting 32 girls in rural Zimbabwe through school. Since then, a further 650,000 children from rural Ghana, Tanzania, Zimbabwe and Zambia have benefited from Camfed’s programme. This includes almost 40,000 girls who have each received four years of bursary support.
Run4Schools
Sports programmes providing an alternative to crime for South African children.
Hope and Homes for Children
Hope and Homes for Children is expanding its de-institutionalisation work into Africa, where children’s institutions have sprung up at an alarming rate. Rwanda is one of the world’s poorest nations and the genocide in the 1990s has left a generation of orphans – around 300,000 children live in a household without an adult. The Rwandan government is keen to close these institutions and ensure that their children are cared for by families, or in family-style surroundings.
Sofronie is helping HHC to reform childcare services in Rwanda. It is starting off with one institution in Kigali, Rwanda’s capital city. Only children without known parents are accepted in the institution and are often placed there by the police or referred by communities or hospitals.
Using information from these groups, the HHC team will be able to assess where these children are coming from. They will then work with those communities to develop prevention and family support services, such as community hubs. This will reduce and eventually stop the flow of children into the institution. At the same time the HHC team will be working to place all the children resident in the institution into family-based care.