A Unique Approach to Child Sponsorship

Child sponsorship has long been an effective way for Canadians to make personal connections with the developing world. By forging personal links, child sponsorship has made hundreds of thousands of Canadians reconsider their relationship to the rest of the world.

Nonetheless, when CAUSE Canada was in the planning stages of CAUSE Kids, there was a poster in the office with the headline: “Why You Should NOT Sponsor a Child.” The poster outlined the many ways child sponsorship programs could exacerbate or create problems in the communities they were trying to help.

The problems on that poster included the creation of family rifts when one child is sponsored and others are not, sponsorship favouring families of particular religious or political orientations, cultural insensitivity, misrepresenting the realities of affluence and poverty, creating false hope, and being far too expensive for the benefits it produced.

CAUSE Canada refused to implement a child sponsorship program until we planned one that would not only avoid the problems sometimes associated with sponsorship, but would address them positively. We committed ourselves to a program that would help Canadians make personal connections to individuals in developing countries, but would also promote sound community development. Our program would be non-discriminatory, strengthen local culture, provide educational opportunities for both sponsor and beneficiary, achieve real improvements, and would operate efficiently for the maximum benefit of our friends overseas.

In order to meet such lofty criteria, CAUSE Kids had to include some significant community development characteristics . We are pleased to say that it does:

CAUSE Kids is school centered
Sponsorship that supports one child while ignoring the others isolates that child from her peers. For this reason, CAUSE Kids works on a whole-school basis. School supplies, books, infrastructure, teacher training, and uniforms benefit each child in the school equally, regardless of religion, politics or ethnicity. This strategy means that for every student sponsored, the CAUSE Kids program directly benefits 8 children.

CAUSE Kids emphasizes the girl-child
Girls with higher education marry later and have fewer children, higher income, and longer life expectancy. Yet, when resources are slim, it is usually girls who lose their educational opportunities first. By covering the costs of school uniforms, meals and basic health, while offering improved livelihood opportunities to students’ families, CAUSE Kids directly addresses the main reasons girls are kept out of school.

CAUSE Kids is community oriented
Programs that don’t fit in locally will not work, and may contribute to dependency and cultural erosion. CAUSE Kids implements programs that are articulated and directed by the community, and for which they donate land, materials or labour.

CAUSE Kids is wholistic
A rural community in West Africa has many of the same needs as a community in Canada. Social, economic, and environmental health are all necessary for a viable community. CAUSE Kids starts with education while addressing all of the factors that contribute to breaking the cycle of poverty in the child’s family and community.

CAUSE Kids is efficient
Over the past ten years, CAUSE Canada has averaged less than 9% on administration and fundraising combined. CAUSE Kids is committed to reducing our administrative expenses in Canada in order to maximize the benefits in Sierra Leone.