Gruppo Tanzania Onlus and KISEDET, like many other organizations who focus on sponsorships, began with the “classic” SAD (sostegni a distanza: child sponsorships), which stands for one sponsor per child. However, for a year or so, Gr Tz Onlus and KISEDET NGO have proposed doing larger sponsorship, like of a whole community.
Everything began 10 years ago when the street children project started in the capital city of Tanzania, Dodoma. The process of approaching, meeting, sheltering and recovering varies both in efficiency and time (each and every street child has his own story and needs to have an individual project) and through experience, we have learned that “forcing” them into recovery does more harm than good. In this case, having the one-sponsor per child approach was extremely difficult, thus, we decided to introduce collective SAD, which would help finance the various stages of abandoning life on the streets and dropping at our children centers which are: Drop In Center (the day center),Shukurani Shelter Home (short-term children’s home) and the Chigongwe Family (long-term children’s home).
The results were very positive and our sponsors are more than happy to continue to sponsor such a well-structured and important project, our social workers at Kisedet are able to work better and make full-use of our economic resources, and more children are able to completely leave the streets and have a better chance of a fresh start. We have therefore started to propose collective sponsors even in the educational field, so that instead of sponsoring one student, you can sponsor a whole village, or the whole school. Obviously, it may be necessary to have one-on-one sponsors for those who need more help and those who are in danger of being left behind. This has allowed us to continue collaborating with the local government, and to remain within the limits stated by the Tanzanian law.
If we support the school to build classrooms, laboratories, school desks etc. we are helping the students and teachers, and the benefits will be seen by everyone; if there will be any top students, we will be able to help them continue with their studies, and anyway, with this project, we are able to obtain better results by working collectively. We understand that sponsoring one child is maybe more motivating as you create a stronger emotional connection, especially when you receive news and letters from the child annually, like a sort of moral receipt. It’s also true that our objective is to help as many children/ young adults as possible and with a collective SAD, we are able to do so.
Many of our sponsors have switched to collective SAD and are happy with their choice, and knowing that their donations is helping an entire school makes them feel proud. They realize that they are active participants of a cooperation project. For these reasons, we propose “Their Future”, a School Collective SAD.
Your annual donation of 300 euros will go towards sponsoring their whole educational journey, whether the child/young adult lives at home or at one of our children’s home. You will receive annual updates from Tanzania about the project of education by Kisedet. If anyone still prefers a single sponsorship, we can still do that.