ECAF stands for ‘Educate A Child Africa Foundation’, a UK a registered charity.
Working predominantly in Zimbabwe, we assist and support orphans and under privileged children with tuition fees and other advocacy needs.
The sponsorship will make a huge difference, ensuring education and other basic needs are met. You can sponsor an orphan for just £20 per month. Alternatively, for just £20 pounds per term you can pay their tuition fees; or £60 for a full year.
International organisations define poverty as living on less than $2 per day. Extreme poverty is living on less than $1 per day.
But the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) also states that: “poverty can also mean the denial of opportunities and choices most basic to human development – to lead a long, healthy, creative life; to have a decent standard of living.”
This means that alleviating poverty is not just about providing the bare necessities, but ensuring that people have dignity and quality of life too. This is precisely what ECAF is trying to do by giving orphans opportunities in life that otherwise would not have been available.
A million Zimbabweans benefiting from United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) aid are facing hunger due to a lack of funding that has caused deep cuts in assistance since 2014.
Similarly, close to two million orphans and vulnerable children who are supposed to benefit from the Basic Education Assistance Module (BEAM) have failed to attend school since 2010 due to lack of funds. For instance, the US$15 million allocated by the Zimbabwean treasury in 2015 only assisted 83,000 against the targeted 250,000 vulnerable children; figures have since worsened”.
The implication is that these orphans have not been able to access government assistance for both primary and secondary education.”
For primary schools our initial target is 1000 children at a total cost of US$20 per child per term which amounts to US$60 000 per year.
Unless partners and donors come forward to assist, well over a million children will not have their educational or basic needs met in the next decade in Zimbabwe.
We welcome any assistance we can get, no matter how limited it may seem. If you feel you can help or share ECAF’s vision and values, please get in touch with us. We also believe that members of local communities should be trained and supported in finding solutions to problems within their respective regions. Please refer to our donation or contact details on this website; we also have Facebook presence under ECAF.
We will find value in whatever resources or stationery you can assist with, please feel free to make contact with one of our representatives in the UK or in Zimbabwe.
Absolutely! Why not explore our website for ways to give, campaign, give ideas or advice or raise funds with ECAF? We don’t believe anybody should live on handouts, we strive to provide long-term aid to equip the orphans with education, skills, tools and opportunities to live with dignity. We develop and teach them how best to support their families as they grow and give back to their communities.
ECAF is funded by individual sponsors and donors globally. We are in the process of applying for support from the UK government’s Department for International Development, the European Union and organisations such as Comic Relief, development and charitable agencies.
As a consequence of HIV and AIDS, cholera and related pandemics, Zimbabwe faces one of the biggest challenges in death rates in Africa. The lives of millions of children, adolescents and young people have been redefined by HIV and AIDS (UNICEF, 2018).
Sadly, this world sees a child becoming orphaned every 2 seconds, as many others lose parental care as a result of poverty, natural disasters, conflicts and diseases. In Zimbabwe these child figures are close to two million. The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) estimates that 13 percent of Zimbabwean children are also engaged in child labour. The International Labour Organisation defines such work as harmful to children’s physical and mental development and interferes with their education and growth.
The global child labour index by Maplecroft, an international risk analysis firm, ranks Zimbabwe among the 10 worst performers, out of 197 countries surveyed worldwide, for the frequency and severity of its reported child labour incidents. In sub-Saharan Africa, 10 million children drop out of school every year, robbing them the means to empower them with knowledge and skills; that create opportunities for a brighter future.
While numerous efforts have been made to implement community-based initiatives, which support orphans and vulnerable children (OVC), the focus has been primarily on providing material and psychosocial support. The approach has neglected to provide education and valuable life-skills information which orphans and children need in these special circumstances. Educate a Child Africa Foundation aims to bridge this gap, assisting vulnerable children in Zimbabwe where other organisations (such as NGOs) have had to leave due to political reasons and financial constraints.
At ECAF stewardship is one of our key values. This means that we take great care of the valuable resources entrusted to us by our supporters. The amount we spend on fundraising and governance is very low compared with other charities.
For each pound you donate:
90p in every pound donated is spent on our international development work in education, advocacy and campaigning to tackle orphan poverty. Only 10 pence is spent on fundraising and governance costs.
We recognise that sometimes our values and commitments might not be upheld to the standard expected. If this is the case, we want to be informed.
All information will be managed confidentially.
ECAF upholds certain values and high standards of organisational, professional and personal conduct.
We will use any information shared to try to put things right, improve our quality, and to help us to become more effective. Please refer to our telephone contacts / postal address.
ECAF and its partners take pride in the various projects to assist orphans in Zimbabwe: