Hope for a Child has a dream… to see millions of children who have been made vulnerable by parental illness, death and extreme poverty; be given access to nurture, health care, nutrition and education from within family networks.
We are determined to enable this dream to become a fact.
Hope for a Child was set up and launched as a registered charity in 2007. However the idea had begun to germinate 3 years before that. It all started when Roy Herring visited an orphanage in China. On returning home he found that the memory of these orphaned and abandoned children had taken up residence in his heart. He and his wife Sue went on to adopt a child from a similar orphanage. It became glaringly obvious that institutional care though often necessary, is a very poor option compared to children being cared for in a family network – best of all, their birth family network in their own community. Roy and Sue felt inspired to find some way of helping vulnerable children. The huge scale crisis in Africa caused by HIV/Aids and by poverty seemed a sensible place to start. Thus Hope for a Child was born.
Research and fund raising began in earnest, hand in hand. We were privileged to have on board from the start a couple who provided the injection of energy and talent we needed to give Hope for a Child some ‘legs’. Louise Smith has been a director since the start and her husband Philip has been involved with research, on site visits and fund raising.
After much investigation into various ways of supporting orphans we decided upon Village Savings and Loans Schemes. This method is an established method and now generally recognised as best practice for empowering mothers to earn. It involves bringing together groups of adults – usually women – and teaching them how to save, loan out to each other and start up small businesses. This causes a rise in standard of living which in turn puts families in a better position to take in orphans from their extended family and neighborhood.
We were drawn at the beginning to Uganda. After spending time there, falling in love with the beautiful, gentle people and looking at existing projects, we decided this was the place to begin our adventure. In order to implement this we partnered with an already established Village Savings and Loans Schemes organisation running groups in Iganga District. This enabled us to learn and establish ourselves. Now we are launching out into running our own schemes in Kampala, as well. In 2008 we were privileged to be able to employ Rose Gidongo, a Ugandan who lives in Kampala. Rose manages the Hope for a Child projects in Uganda from our office in Kampala. Finances raised by us are all channeled into employing trainers who run the savings and loans groups and help the women start their businesses.
We have seen many dramatic results from this in the 2 years we have been running the groups. We have wonderful stories of businesses flourishing leading to the ultimate aim – children being adequately cared for and educated.
Hope for a Child is committed to seeing many more Savings and Loans groups develop in Uganda and then in many other African countries.
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Current Projects
Empower a Mother
Who are We?
Our Vision