Most people would know what child sponsorship is. It is a form of charity where a sponsor, who provides a certain amount of money each year, is paired up with a child who lives in a challenging situation. The money from the sponsor goes to the child and typically it will ensure the child receives education and adequate health care. For the sponsor it is a rewarding way of giving since you, if you regularly communicates with the child, gets a verification that your contribution makes a concrete difference.
Now, to make the child sponsorship format achieve its purpose you need to provide some way for the sponsor to communicate with the child. This communication doesn’t occur spontaneously. Getting letters to and from people living in rural Uganda can be difficult and demands an effort by the organization. At Action Aid this is done by organizing message writing events with the kids. Typically all the sponsored children in a group of villages are invited to a public place a certain day. There they are supplied with blank letters, pens, color crayons, colorful stickers and get to, depending on their age, either write a message to their sponsor or make a drawing for their sponsor. The younger children which only makes drawings gets help by a field worker, a person form the community who is engaged for the day, to write a message to the sponsor. Typically the message contains information about the child’s living condition, how they have improved and what problems the child faces. The messages are then collected, registered and sent off to the correct sponsors.
The impressive thing about this is the scale of the operation. Each one of the events above would host 50-100 children and each time Action Aid collect messages in the Nebbi region there are 10-20 events like this. And this is done twice a year. I arrived in Nebbi just as the process to collect the second batch of letters for 2016 was started. It begun by a big meeting in Nebbi where all the field workers were invited (around 30 people). This meeting lasted for a full day. The message collection events where planned and potential challenges and mistakes in the process were discussed. For example, it is crucial that as many as possible of the sponsored children show up for the events. Any child that doesn’t show up for the event will have to be handled separately. So for each meeting a certain number of mobilizers are engaged. These are people whose only responsibility is to make the children come to the events. They go house to house during the week before the event and invites the children. Moreover, to keep track of the large number of children and their letters you need a database where you keep contact details, information on living conditions etc. At one of the events I helped out in collecting some of that data. Contact details is generally given by the village where the family resides together with the name of the head of the household. The data on the living conditions include the type of house (mud hut with grass thatched roof or brick house with corrugated roof) and any farmland or animals owned by the family as well as proximity to clean water, health care and schools. Moreover, each child has his or her photo taken and to be able to match each profile with the correct photo you write down exactly what the child is wearing on the day of the event. I’m writing about this because I have been sponsoring children myself. I remember enjoying the letters I received but I never realized what a great organizational effort that is behind it.
The car is loaded up with soda to keep the blood sugar of the kids at the right level.
Working on her message.
Carol, assisting with glue, stickers and glitter
Kids queuing up at a field worker to get help with their messages
A finished message...
...with field worker's comment.
Apart from the organizational challenge, the child sponsorship format has another challenge. It has to do with the way Action Aid work. Action Aid started as child sponsorship organization. Its initial focus was to provide education. This was in 1972. Since then the world, and Action Aid, has changed. For example, primary school education is free in Uganda since 1997. But, although this has made enrollment into primary school drastically increase, problems around education persist. Still, a lot of kids don’t go to school. The reasons are many. Kids skip school to work or take care of their younger siblings while their parents work. Some kids get married before they finish school and drops out because of that. Moreover, there is a problem with the quality of schools. The classes are big. Up to 100 students in a class room. And the supply of teachers is often short. Thus, supporting education calls for other measures than just providing school fees. First of all, it is important to make people (parents and community leaders) understand the importance of education. Carol formulated it in a good way. She said that you need to make people understand that giving your children an education is not expensive. It is a lot more expensive if you don’t give your children an education because then you need to give them farm land and animals. Moreover, there is a need to teach parents and children how to demand their educational rights. If teachers don’t show up for school, then the parents should know how to talk to the school principal about this. If the school don’t have adequate housing, then the community needs to know how to demand it from the government. And this is reflected in the work that Action Aid does. They are moving away from actually providing stuff for people. Instead they try to teach people how to either provide it for themselves or demand it from their government. They have projects with the objective to teach people about their rights and how to ensure they are not violated, how to campaign for things and how to expose leaders that doesn’t do their job.
Now, it is not entirely clear how to combine this approach with the child sponsorship model. It is in the nature of the projects above that they should not be aimed at one person. They should be aimed at the whole community. So the way it is now the main bulk of the money the sponsors provide doesn’t go to the child and its family. Instead it goes to various empowerment and education projects that benefit the whole village or the whole community of the child. The sponsors are well aware of this but it does sometimes provide a challenge when it comes to the sponsored children’s families. They might expect to receive concrete things, like money or animals but instead they can only benefit from projects aimed at the whole community. It is not obvious how to explain the advantage of this approach to the children's families. And it might also be difficult to explain why their child in particular should be the one communicating with the sponsor when the money is used for things that benefit the whole community.
