AfriKids Ghana
Introduction
The AfriKids Ghana Head Office is a formidable collection of local development experts who have extensive knowledge of child rights, project management, finance, social development and micro-finance. The Head Office directly delivers AfriKids' core projects and monitors and provides support to partner projects, as well as driving the organisation's development, managing donor relations, providing micro-finance and training, developing sustainability projects, liaising with external stakeholders, and disseminating two support funds, the AfriKids medical and education funds.
Core Projects
Operation Sunglight tackles child labour in the galamsey gold mines of the Talensi Nabdam district in Ghana's Upper East region
Operation Sirigu's Child Rights Centre, helping stamp out the 'spirt child' phenomenon
Where there is an issue affecting child rights which is not being successfully addressed by another organisation, AfriKids Ghana will launch a project to address it. These Projects tend to focus on particularly sensitive and complex problems including child trafficking, child labour and traditional belief related abuse. AfriKids Ghana has developed an exceptionally talented and focused team of local experts and is best placed to deal with these issues.
Collaboration with local authorities and civil society organisations is also integral to our core projects. We aim to encourage more action to be taken to tackle the issue in question by local stakeholders in child welfare. These projects have defined goals and fixed timescales, designed to ensure that their impact will be sustainable in the long term. As AfriKids Ghana's organisational sustainability projects develop, they will fund these projects.
Find out about the individual core projects initiated by AfriKids Ghana
"It is widely recognised in the development community that AfriKids, a small but highly focused and lean (admin costs of just 6%) organisation, punches well above its weight. In recent years several national awards have been won acknowledging its locally driven approach, insistence on absolute sustainability for all its projects and the high level of accountability and transparency demonstrated by the quality of its detailed feedback to all donors and supporters.
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Nick Eastcott
Chairman of AfriKids' Medical Advisory Board
Partner Projects
AfriKids' mission is to ensure that every child in Ghana is afforded their rights in accordance with the UN convention on the rights of the child, to which Ghana was the first African signatory. AfriKids was established to fulfil this mission specifically through empowering local people to employ their ingenuity and drive in addressing child rights issues. Therefore, wherever possible we form partnerships with already existing projects which have their own management structure and vision.
We fund and advise these projects through a three phase programme which lasts between two and ten years, from expansion of their activities to consolidation and, finally, to the development of initiatives which will ensure the independent sustainability of the project after AfriKids' funding ends.
Find out about the inspirational projects AfriKids is assisting
"If you tell any child over and over again that they are worthless and a menace to society, over time they will come to believe it. Not only will they lose respect for themselves but they will also lose respect for everyone and everything. This is the making of criminals, not the street. The street is the place that allows them to eat."
Clare Armstrong
Former AfriKids' Fieldworker
Sustainability Projects
AfriKids has always focused on the sustainability of our work in northern Ghana and has successfully implemented many small scale sustainability programmes on our partner projects. However we are aware that genuine long term sustainability relies on the economic development of the region as a whole. With this in mind AfriKids is developing a range of projects which will create job opportunities and inject investment and skills into the local economy as well raising an income for AfriKids Ghana.
The end goal is for AfriKids Ghana to finance its inspirational child rights work through profits from its own organisational sustainability projects. The UK registered branch of AfriKids, which is primarily a fundraising body, will shut down. This phase of our work began in earnest in 2007 with the purchase of the AfriKids Medical Centre.
As this is an unusual trajectory for a charity to take and one that has, to our knowledge, not been achieved before, we are having to carve our own path. As ever, at the heart of this is employing local expertise to plan, design and run the projects. Behind each project, we also have specialist committees, with membership from Ghana, the UK and further afield, to advise and participate in the project's development.
This is a unique opportunity to bring all stakeholders in northern Ghana's economy and children's welfare together to make a concrete and long term change for the better. As a relatively small, highly flexible and extremely pragmatic and focused charity, which has worked hard to establish a trusted presence in the region, we have a unique opportunity to put a new model of lasting development assistance into practice. It puts AfriKids at the forefront of grass roots development, and gives enlightened donors the chance to transform the lives of children in northern Ghana in a more concrete way than ever before.
Find out about the innovative sustainability projects AfriKids have launched
"AfriKids is committed to generating its own income, not just sourcing it from generous people and organisations in the UK. This will require significant capital investment, to create substantial enterprises that will truly form the basis of a self-sufficient organisation in Ghana that continues to carry out AfriKids' work. What this means is that your contributions now and in the coming years are more valuable than ever. Yet both we and our donors should know that, for AfriKids, indefinite fundraising in the UK is not the answer; it should be the means by which we become less reliant on future fundraising"
Georgie Fienberg
AfriKids International Director
