South Africa currently has space for 100,000 children in institutional care. As a result of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, in 2005 there were already approximately 1 million orphans under the age of 15 and by 2010 this number could rise to between 3 and 4 million. Clearly the system is not going to be able to cope with these alarming numbers of children. Furthermore it is estimated that the cost of caring for these children in an institution would require a 10-fold increase in social welfare costs to sustain the growing numbers of orphans through more traditional means. This is a burden which is not sustainable within the current systems.

Sadly child headed households are a reality in South Africa (older children looking after younger siblings in their parental homes.) Many organizations are starting to work in this arena, but none have the depth of experience and knowledge in the field that the National Association of Child Care Workers (NACCW) has. The NACCW have developed an approach called the Isibindi Model, which has been piloted in a number of sites across South Africa.

The program consists of three main elements. Firstly the NACCW carefully selects a number of individuals from the community to be trained in child-care and only the best of this group are ultimately selected as the care givers in the program. These care givers identify the child headed households in their community and draw along side the families to provide them with the support they require on a daily basis. This includes support for their physical needs, educational needs, but very importantly also their psychosocial needs – providing the leadership and guidance they will require to manage their situations effectively.

The second main element is that the program is centered around a physical structure to which the children go on a daily basis for nutritional, educational, and life skills training and simply social interaction and support.

The third and very important element is that drop out rates are high in volunteer programs and this is avoided in the Isibindi Model by paying the volunteers a monthly stipend. Government have thus agreed to pay these stipends on a long-term basis - something which otherwise would be very burdensome for private donors to bear.

JFC and De Beers each contributed $ 265,000 to the multi-year effort and reports over the past six months show substantial progress in the start-up of the program. As the program progresses, we will provide periodic updates on the number of child-headed households receiving assistance and the success rate of the program.

2007 - 4th Quarter Report