SOS Children

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SOS Children (also known as SOS Kinderdorf, Aldeas Infantiles SOS, SOS Villages d'Enfants) has worked for sixty years providing family-based care for children who would otherwise be alone. Today,  we are the  world's largest orphan and abandoned children's charity working in some 124 countries with around 78,000 children living in our care. In addition, we directly support around a million children in the local community with schools, medical centres, and family strengthening programmes (for example supporting families in Africa where the breadwinner has died of HIV/AIDS).

Our strategic goal for the next eight years is to help a million child sponsors give a million children a family life. Of these, one hundred thousand will be given a new family and home in an SOS Children's Village and nine hundred thousand, who might otherwise be street children, will be able to grow up within their own (extended) family with our support.

Although we are always trying to improve it, our working model is very simple. We take groups of seven to ten (less in the developed world) children alone and put them together with a permanent resident SOS mother to make a family for life. We group a dozen or so SOS families like this together in a Village and then work out from this centre to try to help the wider community with the facilities needed. If there is no adequate medical care, we provide it, if no school we build one, if there are families on the edge nearby (child headed families etc) we support them.

We raise funds to build Villages, Schools and Medical Centres and to pay for running costs. Then donors sponsor a child or a village to cover the village running costs. When we have all the running costs covered by sponsorship we start again. We only offer children who live with us for child sponsorship, and we explain more about what makes our form of sponsorship special at our UK child sponsorship microsite.

As well as a rather unique model based around SOS Mothers and building families, SOS Children has very strong local rooting (hence locally translating the name into every language). Some other development charities concentrate on the worst off countries and leave as things improve: we remain commited to our children and as countries develop we raise an increasing proportion of funds locally. In places like India, South Africa and Pakistan well over four fifths of the funds we need are raised locally by people who see the value of our work and in total the contribution from the developing world exceeds the contribution from the UK by nearly a factor of ten.