Two running, two not

Most children called orphans have a living relative who would take them in — if they could afford one more child at the table.

This is the whole idea, and the only program we are running today. When a child loses a parent, we look for family first: an aunt, a grandmother, an older sibling. If a relative is willing but stretched, we close the gap with a monthly stipend and a caseworker who visits. It costs a fraction of residential care, and the child keeps their name, their village, and the people who already love them. We are starting small on purpose — a handful of households we can actually visit every month, rather than a number that looks better in an appeal.

Fees, a uniform, shoes, and books — the small costs that quietly end a child's education.

School is where support is most visible and most easily lost. A uniform outgrown in March can end a girl's education by April. For every child in our care we cover fees, uniform, shoes, books, and exam registration, and we track attendance child by child. When a child stops showing up, someone goes to the house that week to find out why. This runs alongside kinship care from day one; the two are not separable in practice.

Turning eighteen should not be a cliff. This program does not exist yet, and saying so matters.

The hardest failure in this field is the young person supported beautifully until their eighteenth birthday and then dropped. We intend to run aftercare to age 24 — vocational training or tuition, a savings match, help with a first room, and a caseworker who keeps answering the phone. We are not running it yet. The children we support are young, so the need is years away, and we would rather build it when it is real than list it now to look complete.

A last resort we hope never to need, described here so you know where we stand on it.

Some children genuinely have no relative able to take them. If we ever reach that case, we would run a small house — six children, two house parents who live there permanently, children attending the local public school — rather than a dormitory. We would not accept short-term visitors. We are in no hurry to build this. Every child we place with family is a child who does not need it, and an institution should be the option you reach for last, not the one you fundraise on.