The Christian Children's Fund Child sponsorship programme : Communication and Awareness Challenges
Date
2012-04-04
Authors
Chomba, Tobias
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Abstract
This report is based on the student's attachment and work experience with Christian Children's Fund (CCF), Zambia. The student's main area of concern was the child sponsorship program of CCF. The child sponsorship programme emphasizes on building and strengthening partnership between the child and the sponsor, demonstrating achievements through accountability and quality program delivery, promoting child well being and cross-cultural awareness education.
The student sought to find out the communication and awareness challenges so as to propose informed and appropriate interventions in order to improve child sponsorship management and ensure sponsor retention. Sponsor retention is complex and largely depends on quality (content and timeliness) of communications sent to sponsors. Sponsors require that children demonstrate their mental development, and one-way sponsors ascertain this, is through the quality (content) of communication they receive from children; and how much the child is involved in CCF activities. In addition, how much the child demonstrates his or her understanding of the relationship engaged in with sponsors will help in shaping the child's interaction with the sponsor through communications. The student also sought to find out whether CCF in trying to fulfill its objectives, was applying the basic tenets of participatory development communication and interpersonal commxmication. These theories propose that there should be a lot of involvement of intended beneficiaries in all stages of the development process. It is also on the premise that when intended beneficiaries are not actively involved in the development process, the results will not be long lasting. The report reveals that in case of CCF, the theories are only in practice in some areas. The intended beneficiaries to a large extent are not involved in the development process though CCF structure itself provides for participation. As a result, there are many problems being faced by the children as well as the projects affiliated to CCF. Therefore the student makes recommendations for improvement of operations of CCF and its affiliated projects in running of the child sponsorship programme.
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Child support , Christian communities