Sponsor a Child in Africa

SOS Children worked in Asia and the Americas before Africa, but our work has grown and become well established in most African countries. In the 1971 the donors sponsoring Children in the SOS Children's Village in Abobo Gare in Côte d'Ivoire marked the beginning.

Over the time that SOS Children has been active in Africa, disasters and war have time and time again required a quick reaction to help those most in danger. Sometimes providing emergency relief was what led SOS Children to begin its activities in a country, and donors who contributed to help with the emergencies often become child sponsors supporting permanent facilities which followed the short-term and medium-term relief efforts.

There have been disasters such as the complete collapse of any state order in Somalia at the beginning of the 1990s. SOS Children remained in the country throughout the chaos. For a while, SOS was the only organisation active in the country. As well as a Children's Village, where it is still possible to sponsor children, SOS Children now runs a well-respected mother and child clinic that is visited frequently, an emergency child and a nursing school in Mogadishu.

Other tragedies unfolded in Ethiopia, Mozambique, Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Sudan. SOS Children is still active in all of these countries. In some cases, staff members risked their own lives to protect the children or help those in need.

In Rwanda nine children and nine staff members could not be saved during the three months of continual genocide in 1994.

In 1999 children, mothers and staff members from SOS Children's Village Bo in Sierra Leone were repeatedly forced to into hiding in order to survive.

In Liberia, for example, more than 8,000 people fled to SOS premises near the capital Monrovia in 2003 when fighting broke out.

SOS Children launched an emergency relief programme in Algeria following the May 2003 severe earthquake.

Mali also faced a problematic food supply situation as a result of poor crop yields in the 2003/2004 season and locust invasions. Based in the SOS Children's Village in Socoura near Mopti, SOS employees have distributed food and milk to 570 families with 2,200 children in 16 villages to help them get through the crisis.

In 2005 up to a third of Niger's population suffered from food scarcity. Every day children died from under nourishment. SOS Children started an emergency relief programme for children in danger of dying from acute starvation in the region of Tahoua.

SOS Children also focuses on improving the school infrastructure in the catchment area of projects. Africa is way ahead of other continents in terms of the number of SOS schools it has, but the number of pupils is comparable to that in Asia.

There is a special school in Tema in Ghana, where talented pupils from the whole of Africa can gain good qualifications at College so they can go to university. The college focuses on education in pan-African matters, which is intended to promote understanding and solidarity between African countries.

If there is no local school for the children near to where the SOS Village is built, we build one and children from the local community attend. An example this is in the Ouagadougou Village in Burkina Faso, where an SOS nursery school was built in September 1997. This school is very popular with the children in the neighbourhood who attend together with the SOS children.

As the SOS children get older, it is important that they have the chance to experience living independently. An example of this is in Botswana where older children have a 'halfway house', where they are responsible for their own shopping, cooking, cleaning, budgeting and school work, but they live very near to the village to visit.

SOS Villages in Africa often come together to have fun and make friends. For example in Tema, Ghana a total of 750 children and young people from Ghana, Benin and Nigeria met up to play football.

Making a secure place for children to grow up, providing good schools and being on the ground to help when disasters hit are important responsibilities for SOS Children, but there is another big challenge that we have yet to talk about. That is the spread of HIV AIDs in Africa.

HIV/AIDS represents one of the greatest threats to many African countries, particularly those south of the Sahara, which includes countries like South Africa. This is one of the main reasons why in recent years SOS Children has been improving and extending its family support, community-based projects and social work to care for and protect vulnerable children and educate people about the risks of HIV and AIDS. In the years to come Africa will remain the most important target area for SOS Children's Villages.

The fight against HIV/AIDS is a priority at SOS Children's Village Gitega, Burundi. At the school a 'Stop-AIDS Club' was created in 2004 for children aged between eleven and twelve. This was not only to teach the children what HIV/AIDS is, but also to inform them about means of protection.

There is also awareness raising about another life threatening disease, that is Malaria. In Bakoteh in the Gambia a representative from the National Malaria Control Programme was invited to talk about how, although curable and preventable, malaria kills more than a million people each year. Most of them are children under five.

Along with preventative medicine, SOS offers medical centers to directly treat patients. The SOS Medical Centre in Mbalmayo near the capital of Yaoundé in Cameroon is attached to the SOS Children's Village, and provides the population with general medical care as well as preventative health counselling.