Education Ethiopia Project #23758

Sustaining 50 Reunified Children in Rural Ethiopia

by Abraham's Oasis

Project Report | Dec 28, 2018
Final Report of Reunified Children

By Catharina van den Bosch | Founder/Director

This is our final report for the Reunified Children.

Over the years we have managed to re-unify around 51 children from our residential care facility back to their families. We helped the families financially on a monthly basis for three years with quarterly follow-up on the well being of the children and their family. At the end of the three years we have given all families small business skills training and given them a once-off financial donation to be used for income generating activity. We followed them for an additional year to make sure the families were coping.

We are pleased to report that with your financial assistance and funding from other sources we have managed to complete this project succesfully. All children have remained within their family are in school and are valuable members of their community. In 2019 the last five families will leave the project and for this reason we are closing this project on Global Giving.

We are very pleased with the result of this project as it was a big step into the unknown when we ventured out on this activity. We strongly believed that children belong in their birth family as much as possible but how this would work out practically was for us the big unknown. We have been pleasantly surprised by the willingness of families to receive their children back and with the economic empowerment component we made them independent from our organization. We now have 51 families who have enough income to look after their children and can function independent from our organization in the future. This enables us to focus our resources on other vulnerable children.

Our mission is to provide sustainable solutions for the vulnerable and margininalized and we can whole heartedly state that this project has 100% succeeded in reaching that mission.

We want to express our heartfelt thanks to all our donors from around the globe who have believed in this project and have given us the financial resources to implement it.

We hope you will consider supporting one of our other projects on Global GIving.

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Oct 9, 2018
The older children

By Ruth C. Kennedy | Advisor

Jul 17, 2018
Happy families

By Catharina van den Bosch | Founder/Director

Beneficiary with her new goats

We keep getting positive reports from our social worker who travels far and wide to visit our re-unified children and their families. The children are settled, families are happy and the families who have been trained in income generating activities are doing well. We are pleased to hear the good reports and it confirms again and again that four years ago we decided to do the right thing for "our" children.

Children belong in their families and not in institutional care. Yes maybe the first few months were challenging for especially the older children, but if you see how they have adjusted and how they have integrated in family and community life, it makes it worthwhile.

It has come at a cost as some of the sponsors of the children were not happy as in their mind our residential care provision was much better than what a family could offer. It is sad as some people fail to see that material things can never replace the value of belonging in a family and a community. We have seen that the families love their children and that poverty is absolutely not a reason to take children out of their family and put them in an institution.

Moreover we have now succeeded to avoid dependancy on us as an organization by enabeling these families to generate some additional income. We see that the goats and sheep whom the families bought are now being multiplied, little shops are generating income and the families continue to provide care and love to their children. For some children the time has now come that we confidently can "cut the cord" as we are sure that the family will continue to help them. They are not "our children" any more, they are children who are completely accepted into their family and community. This is where they belong and they don't need us anymore.

We hope that you will continue to support us for a few more years but this project will certainly come to an end in about two years time once all the children have completed their four years re-unification mark when we can say: mission accomplished!

We are forever grateful for all of you to believing in this project and partnering with us. We can call the first children who have fased out a succes and you as partners have been a vital part in their succes story!

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