Sarah’s Kids / Scholarship program for Malawian Children

The Background

Malawi has many children who have been abandoned and forced to live on the streets due to poverty, derelict or deceased parents, abusive families, escape from slavery, or escape from childhood marriage. Samaritan Trust Shelter for Street Kids provides a place for these children to sleep, two meals a day, and help to resume their education in local government schools.

While volunteering at Samaritan Trust over the course of many years, Sarah Adams found that the most vulnerable children from the shelter were not succeeding in school.  Local government schools were often overcrowded, with as many as 100 students per teacher, so children were not able to get the attention they needed to learn, let alone catch up in school.

As a result, Sarah set up a sponsorship program for “Sarah’s Kids” in order for the most at-risk kids to attend local private schools where the student/teacher ratio is often 20/1, and the kids get the supplementary assistance they need to continue their education confidently. 

By providing all of these kids with a private education, they are much more likely to finish school, and to be eligible for college.  Even having just a high school diploma puts them in the top 12% of Malawians in the job market, and helps eliminate the risk for slavery or prostitution.

This project focuses on providing the funding needed to cover the annual tuition, school and nutrition related expenses for 20-plus boys & girls currently in the program (headcount fluctuates by school term as children graduate, are newly entered, or reintegrate to their villages).  

We now also support children who were formerly at Samaritan Trust and are now at Dzanja la Chifundo, which is a nearby orphanage with fewer children and capacity to treat special needs.

In addition, we do Home Based Care with some of the children’s siblings who are still living at home but do not have access to proper nutrition or education.  We do this by bringing the family food parcels on a regular basis, and by administering school funds directly to their schools