Can You Save a Child for $1 a Day?

As the founder of a South African nonprofit, I often find myself making a case for orphaned and vulnerable children. Recently, I was sitting with a hedge fund manager in his luxury high-rise office in Mayfair when he said to me: “Your strategy doesn’t seem to be sustainable.” His skepticism, although frustrating, was not hard to understand. All I have to do is walk down Oxford Street to see well-respected charities, recruiting donors to “Save a child with $1 per day”, to realize that our proposition of $3,000 per child, seems like a radical one.

The proliferation of quick-fix and cheap solutions, like the ones offered by charities on the street, has led society to accept an inferior standard of development for the most impoverished children of the world. Behind this is a narrow understanding of impact, and the belief that success in the nonprofit sector comes from reaching enormous numbers.

My nonprofit, Ubuntu Education Fund, wasn’t immune to this in the early years. We too started off chasing impressive-sounding numbers as we distributed textbooks and provided computers to schools. But it soon became clear that education didn’t exist in a vacuum. Students failed to perform in the classroom because they were too hungry to focus; even with new school supplies, they had to return to leaky shacks, many without an employed parent to provide for the household.

So we went deeper — instead of worrying about how many children we were reaching, we directed our attention to how significantly we could change the course of each child’s life. Freed from the pressure of reaching an arbitrary number, we were able to raise the bar for the children’s wellbeing, and take steps towards a transformed community.

We developed a “cradle to career” pathway out of poverty for each child, approaching it much like parents raising their children. This meant providing nutritious meals, safeguarding homes, preparing students for exams, providing counseling, and much more. It’s how we arrived at the mission that drives our work: children growing up in Port Elizabeth’s townships deserve what children all around the world deserve — everything.

What we do cannot easily be captured by a spreadsheet of rigid metrics, but the impact of our work is demonstrably profound. When given everything they need to thrive, children can accomplish unprecedented success. Our scholars are teaching at the top universities in the country, working the factory lines of the Eastern Cape and building robots in our after-school program. Vulnerable children do not turn into successful adults in a 12-month grant cycle. Like parenting, the process cannot be replicated or scaled up; it is slow, tedious and personalized.

Funders have offered us hefty sums to build another centre, with the assumption that scaling up to more regions is the obvious next step for a successful organization. However, our idea for the future is simple: doing what we already do, but better.

We continue to advance our model, fill in the gaps and give children all that they need to attain a healthy and stable future. The success of our work is not measured by the number of centers we build or the number of children we reach, but by long-term outcomes: healthy, HIV-negative births, graduates, jobs, financially independent homes.

Following the end of apartheid, I witnessed many organizations set up shop and attempt to eradicate poverty by one-off interventions: cups of soup, condoms, school supplies. However, transformative change comes from investing in children every day of their lives. There is no strategy more sustainable than raising a child from cradle to career.

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This piece was adapted from an article that originally appeared in The Guardian on 7/13/16.