ActionAid to rethink child sponsorship as part of plan to ‘decolonise’ its work | Global development

Child sponsorship programs that allow donors to select children in poor countries to support can carry racist, patriarchal overtones and need to be transformed, ActionAid UK’s newly appointed co-chairs have said, as they set out to “decolonise” the organisation’s work.

ActionAid started in 1972 by finding sponsors for schoolchildren in India and Kenya, but Taahra Ghazi and Hannah Bond launched their co-leadership this month with the aim of shifting narratives about aid from sympathy to solidarity and partnership with global movements.

This will involve looking at how ActionAid UK’s work is funded, working with teams in Africa, Asia and Latin America so they can help shape a model that reflects the needs of the communities they work with.

Ghazi said: “Most of our supporters are relatively affluent people and many of them are white, so if you’re asking them to pick a picture of a brown or black child and choose the country they’re from, that’s a very transactional and very patriarchal relationship. We recognize that the current model of child sponsorship reflects a different time.”

ActionAid’s supporters sponsor children in 30 countries, which provides 34% of the charity’s global funding, according to Ghazi.

Gazi said: “We are in a transformation process that includes our systems, how much money we pay, how we receive services until 2028; we are decolonizing it.

“We are evolving the model to be informed by the voices of the community and respond to the realities they face today,” Bond adds. “We value our sponsors and are committed to ensuring their support continues to make a real impact.

“Meaningful change takes time, and this work is rooted in real commitment rather than false commitment.”

As a method of fundraising, the process of allowing donors to choose among the children they support has been likened to “poverty porn” that perpetuates racist attitudes, leading to calls for it to be phased out.

How charities spend money raised through child sponsorship varies; Some use the funds directly to support the child, while others spend it on projects that support the child’s community. Charities often provide regular updates to sponsors and offer the opportunity to exchange letters with them.

Save the Children, which has pioneered fundraising since the charity was founded in 1919, ended its child sponsorship program last year. He said it was not suitable for modern contexts and was also expensive because money that could have been spent on projects had to be used to facilitate the exchange of letters between donors and sponsored children.

Bond and Ghazi’s vision for ActionAid’s future sees it as a feminist, anti-racist organization with a greater focus on fundraising through partnerships with civil society groups. One way that might work would be to encourage groups of friends or family members to form “sisterhoods” in which they collectively raise money to go to women’s rights groups in a developing country.

They also aim to provide long-term funding to grassroots groups that gives those on the ground more authority over their spending, and they plan to launch a fund specifically for women’s rights groups, which have been under attack as a result of the global anti-rights movement.

“The future of ActionAid is about solidarity, justice and how we can truly drive change,” Bond said. “The world is in a bad place, and as a global federation, we have a really important role to play in reducing the injustice that is happening around the world.”

Themrise Khan, an independent researcher in the aid sector, said the practice of marketing mostly African children to Western audiences should be abandoned altogether.

“The whole concept carries a deeply problematic and racist undertone and screams ‘white saviorism,’” Khan said. “Nothing should replace it.

“Better education, state welfare systems and health care should be a model – all responsibilities of a nation state. Not ‘sponsoring a poor African/Asian child for x dollars a month’ to make you feel good about a child you haven’t even seen in person and may never see other than a picture on your fridge.”