Roots of Hope
Strengthening Children, Families and Communities
Roots of Hope moves children from institutional care into safe, loving family homes. It offers a holistic model that nurtures long-term stability and wellbeing by combining:
- Holistic care – including education, healthcare, nutrition, and emotional support.
- Family strengthening – through livelihood training, farming supplies, and improved sanitation.
- Sustainable development – reducing dependency on external aid and aligning with national policy and best practice.
Our objectives: identifying the limiting factors which prevent vulnerable children from being cared for in their communities or attending education; supporting children within their community, out of institutional care; enabling children to return to education; and ensuring families are in a strong position to generate income and alleviate food poverty, to ensure long-term improvement in health and opportunity.
Our strategy: Children in the programme live at home with their family group, which may be parents, siblings or extended family. Homes are assessed for suitability and need. In almost all instances, the main concern is income and food.
Delivery: on land that the family has access to, we provide initial seed, fertiliser and training to enable them to establish self-sufficiency through maize production, vegetable harvesting, and income from sales. This enables the financial means to see children access education, and lifts the families out of food poverty. Our involvement extends to mentoring over a three-year period to the point of establishing complete self-reliance.
Impact: our primary concern is that the child registered in the programme is cared for within their family environment and able to access education. However extended benefits include whole-families being lifted out of food poverty and improving diversity of diet; additional siblings attending school; income generation; and improved mental health, in particular of previously-unemployed fathers. By simple interventions on behalf of the first 29 children enrolled into Roots of Hope, over 112 individuals have been positively impacted.
Roots of Hope is currently our main delivery programme. It started as a response to the need to get children out of unsatisfactory institutionalised care, and is developing to be responsive to other local needs. It is proving to have significant impact where families engage fully.