STAY CONNECTED

WHY COMMUNITIES?

Approximately 90 percent of all children affected by HIV/AIDS and poverty receive care and assistance from community-based organizations (CBOs) and extended families.¹

Even as HIV/AIDS and poverty take a tremendous toll on children and family members, community leaders and local volunteers are doing what they can to care for the most vulnerable in Sub-Saharan Africa.

CBOs bring an abundance of resources to helping struggling children and families. Their time, energy, knowledge, ideas, and solidarity are all vital to making local projects and programs work. In addition to helping children stay in school, CBOs and caregivers ensure that children have food, clothing, shelter, healthcare, and psychosocial support:

A community volunteer visits a household where a parent is ill or dying to provide medicine and counsel family members.
A CBO leader convinces a village chief to give a plot of land for a communal vegetable garden that provides food for poor families.
Committed and active community members and caregivers mobilize local resources to pay children’s school fees.

Because these small community-based groups are closest to vulnerable children and families, they know what their challenges and needs are and work hard to provide them with care and support. Research and experience both consistently demonstrate that despite all of the damage inflicted upon children and families by HIV/AIDS and poverty, communities remain the most vital sources of support and care for vulnerable children.

One of the most effective ways to provide sustainable support to children in Africa is to strengthen the community’s own support system. Civic groups, religious organizations, traditional leadership, and concerned community members mobilize life-changing action on behalf of children and families in need.

Over the past decade, Firelight Foundation has supported communities changing children’s lives. From providing direct funding to CBOs to helping build CBO capacity to reach more vulnerable children and families, Firelight’s approach has been to build on the rich resources of African communities in order to strengthen local organizations and leave them better able to cope with the tremendous strains of HIV/AIDS and poverty.

¹Joint Learning Initiative on Children and HIV/AIDS, 2009 (www.jlica.org).

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