Around this time of year we have hundreds of TV ads asking people to sponser children mostly in Africa and India or Bangladesh. What they tend to do is show how a sponsered child is so much better off in comparison to the many scratching a living in the streets etc. My question is, how does Unicef, Christian Children’s Fund etc decide who to have lined up ready for sponsership when there are so many desparately needy children to chose from?
I can’t answer for how others do it, but I used to be a CCF sponsor … a long time ago. They pick a village (or shantytown of a city) and go in. It appeared to me that the object was to put up the youngest, cutest kid in each family that agreed to the deal for that kid to get a sponsor. CCF doesn’t (or didn’t) hide that the money for that kid really goes to the whole family, and can include such stuff as arranging for the family to get livestock. Everybody in the family knows that one is their ticket to a better life, which makes me queasy, but it’s still a worthwhile use of your money. One reason they pick one kid is so that the sponsor can write to “their” kid (some sponsors even visit “their kid”). I think they usually also start a school in the village or city district, if there isn’t one.
I didn’t like the idea of picking the cutest (or most pitiful) little tyke I could find in the 2-6 year old bracket. It felt like a cheat to me. I asked what kids they had that had lost a sponsor in X, Y and Z countries, and said I wanted to pick one of them. The kid I had the longest was a girl in Brazil (a blonde, which surprised me considerably; I had thought that all the poor folks there were Indian, black, or some mixture) who was in upper elementary grades when I started sponsoring her. When she was in 8th grade, she let me know she had decided to be a nun, and the convent took novices at 14 or 15 (I’ve forgotten exact details; it’s been a looong time). So I asked for another kid that had lost a sponsor, and they gave me a boy, not asking me (I have a son, and no daughters), which did not make me happy; it was fun to buy little extras for a girl. I sponsored him for a while, but then money got a lot tighter for me, and I had to stop.
Sponsors also get mailings that “invite” them to make extra donations to pay for this or that improvement that benefits the entire village or whatever, like a deep well (for clean water). Those are generally “big ticket” - by comparison, at least. It must be 25 years ago, and I think it was $1,000 for a well (obviously the cost was padded - probably heavily).
I doubt whether CCF has changed much over the years; when you have a formula that works, why change it? And probably other agencies don’t work all that differently.
I would encourage anybody that’s thought about it to give it a try; it definitely made me feel good. I would, however, also look up the agencies on the charitable orgs site to make sure they don’t use too much of their income on administration. BTW, it isn’t just developing nations (or wasn’t back when - may still not be); some agencies had/have projects on poor reservations and in the poverty pockets in the mountains of the southern U.S.
Thanks Tyger for your informative response. Sometimes I think about sponsering a child, but end up in this kind of indecisive limbo. I object to paying money to developing nations with corrupt governments who have become dependent on charity aid. I’d much rather give money to help someone start a business that would make them independent of charity - however, I don’t have that kind of money. Also with so many children needing help, sometimes it doesn’t make sense to just pick one. Sponsering a child in NZ, takes about $400 a year.
An American friend of mine had a grandma who sponsered a Taiwanese girl for years - we actually went there and met the family. The dad had died when the kids were young but when we met them they were all adult children earning their own livings.
Just to second that “child sponsorship” normally means sponsoring works in that child’s community not the individual. From a marketing pov I imagine it is more effective and long lasting if the sponsor can visualize an individual rather than a well, medical service or whatever. So what you are sponsoring are local level infrastructure or neccesities works.
If you are interested and want to select a charity: I also second the recommendation to check out charity.orgs.
If you’d rather sponsor “smart charity” in poor areas than a specific child, have you considered the Carter Center or something like the Heifer Project? Both do a lot of work in education on sustainable agriculture, and you can give however much or little as you want. They’re both highly rated charities; that’s how I give my money.
The Carter Center has tons and tons of different programs; for one, they’ve nearly eradicated the guinea worm in a lot of Africa, and they train villagers in more efficient agricultural methods so they can feed themselves. It’s not a handout by any means.
The Heifer Project has you “buy an animal”, which really equates to you paying for animals, veterinary care, transportation, and education on animal husbandry. A family gets your “animal” and agrees to give some of its offspring to other families. Sort of a “teach them to fish” idea. (I gave my parents a water buffalo-to-the-third-world for Christmas through the Heifer Project.) It’s like the “sponsor a child” thing in that you get to pick a specific animal - bees, ducks, cows, sheep, whatever - so you feel like you’ve given a concrete thing, but of course the money really goes to the whole program.
My mother sends money to an orphanage in Nepal, for the care of one child. The money pays for his clothing, food, school supplies, health care etc. prior to that she sent money to support an elderly man with leprosy who was in a hospice and had no family of his own to care for him. My mother-in-law pays the school fees of a little girl she met in Uganda (but this is by private arrangement with the school and the girl’s family).
There are charities which send livestock, water pumps etc to communites, and charities which provide specific healthcare services (cataract surgery, anti TB or leprosy drugs, facial reconstructive surgery etc). They also do good work and at least that way you have more of an idea about what the money you send provides.
Perhaps rather than sending money vaguely to “a child” or “a community” you might prefer to pay to support a named child in an institution, or opt for another type of charity, so that you have more idea of exactly where the money goes.
There are a number of charities which are basically non-profit banks which make relatively small loans to people in third-world countries to start small businesses. They are mostly self-sustaining since they have a good record of nearly everyone being able to pay back their business loan, and they charge relatively low interest on those loans. Your contribution to those charities allows them to expand the number of such loans they can make at any one time.
Another charity that I find appealing that I assume will check out well on charity analyses is the Smile Train. I see Public Service ads periodically in magazines here. They show two photos of a toddler - one very pitiful-looking, with a truly awful cleft palate {teeth growing perpendicularly}, the other after a very creditable surgical repair has healed, wide smile in evidence. It is based on volunteer work by dental surgeons (I assume that plastic surgeons could/would/do also volunteer) who go to regions where medical care is scarce, and dental care even scarcer. According to the ads, the money goes to pay for everything but the surgeon, who volunteers his/her time and pays his/her own transportation. And it makes a dramatic improvement in the future of a child each time one is done.
Maybe you haven’t heard about them there in Ao Tearoa,* but I’d bet there are Kiwi dental surgeons participating! Another advantage to this is the same as the Carter Center or the Heifer Project; it’s not an ongoing obligation. It’s something you can do whenever the spirit moves you and you have the money.
*I’m a long-time Essie Summers fan. 
I’d love to see the place someday, especially the South Island mountains.