The work of UWO in India

How does our sponsorship project work and what challenges do we face?

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The idea behind the sponsorship project is very simple. With the help of Mangala, who knows the families living in her slum, we select the neediest families. 

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When we are in India, they have to provide us with receipts for school fees or tutoring, which we check. Only then will the money be paid out to the families. Of course, we also make sure that the child is present - or at least usually is.

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However, we do not want to hide the difficulties of this program. It happens that we arrive after a year and try to find the children again. However, this does not always work. Sometimes the children were just sent to live with relatives. In other cases, however, the families have left the slum and returned to their home villages. 

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In fact, the slums also serve as temporary accommodation because the families cannot find work in their original home and hope to earn a living in the big city. The slums sometimes serve as a place to live and work at the same time. The residents of the slum live and work on just a few square meters; there are a few communal toilets that have to be shared by hundreds of residents. 

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It is clear that the hygienic conditions are appalling for us Europeans. A wide variety of work is also carried out in the huts, for example bangles are produced for large department store chains, which are bought by them for minimal amounts of cents. 

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If we no longer find families in the slums after a year, we will of course have to replace them. This in turn means that we cannot guarantee our sponsors that they will be able to help their child finish school. 

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Of course we would be happy if we could give this guarantee, but transparency is important to us in this case. We are grateful for all sponsors who support us in this project. If a child needs to be removed from the program, we will of course inform the sponsor and assign a new child.

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Many of the sponsorships were financed through general donations, but we would prefer to know that every child has a permanent sponsor. In addition to the children we have already integrated into our project, there are many more children waiting for support. Help us make the world a little better!

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We introduce our godchildren a little to you on the links next door, but we deliberately do not use their full names.

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