SOS Children's Villages provides a loving home for 124 children in 13 family houses, each headed by an SOS Mother. Most of these children have been orphaned due to the AIDs epidemic, or abandoned due to extreme poverty. Without the charity’s intervention, many of them would be struggling for survival on the streets.
Clare thanked the UK team for their dedication to helping the most vulnerable children in her rural Zambian community. Through fundraising initiatives such as child sponsorship, corporate partnership, and grants from trusts and foundations, SOS Children’s Villages UK has supported the programmes in Chipata since they began there in 2012. Though the programme statistics speak for themselves, Clare’s first-hand stories of the charity’s transformational impact added an even deeper dimension to the sense of progress shared by the Zambian and UK teams.
Clare stressed that there is more to be done; with around 600,000 children orphaned by AIDs in Zambia, and 75% of the population living below the poverty line, it is vital that SOS Children’s Villages continues to partner with local communities to tackle the entrenched problems that lie behind these striking statistics.