Africa's major Child Charity

Africa's major Child Charity

Next year will be SOS Children's fortieth year of helping orphans in Africa. Today we work in 45 countries across Africa and have very experienced and thoughtful staff on the ground to help shape our approach. Since nearly a decade ago AIDS and AIDS orphans have become a major focus of our work, both because AIDS is now the major cause of children left alone who we take into our Village families and also because our mission of trying to give children a family childhood puts AIDS as the central challenge.

Therefore, SOS Children help children and young people whose future is at stake as a consequence of HIV/AIDS. This could be because they are orphaned by AIDS, because their parents are infected with the virus and they are the main carers for younger siblings, or because the children are HIV positive. To start off with we ran simple nurse led programs based on three visits a week to child headed families (we still do) but since we have analysed other opportunities to help in the most effective way possible (such as prevention work).

Our work for AIDS Orphans is growing. In 2005, there were just 57 SOS Social Centres and social support programmes working with children affected by HIV/Aids on the whole African continent. As of 2010 we have hundreds of thousands of children on our programmes throughout all the 45 countries in Africa where we work. These include numerous schools, vocational training centres, medical centres that are actively involved in supporting AIDS Orphans and promoting Aids awareness. The number of beneficiaries is growing all the time but we are aiming to support ten children in the community for each child who ends up living in our Villages because they have no viable community to live in.