A long time missionary in Africa, Jim Harries accurately observes how sponsorship schemes tend to take responsibility from parents. Find more by Jim at http://www.jim-mission.org.uk/articles/ or email him at jharries@africaonline.co.ke
From time immemorial children have been the responsibility of their parents, or other adults under whose protection they fall. This is no longer universally the case. Child sponsorship schemes have proliferated in Africa. One centre alone may adopt hundreds of children. Details vary, but the overall aim is to ensure that a child gets a good education and upbringing despite the poverty of the parents.
Parents now find themselves beneficiaries of a small windfall as a result of having children. The whole family can live off the 'relationship' this child has developed with a white donor seen in a photograph. A small team of people become foster-parents on behalf of donors from many miles away. The African parents are no longer left to bring up their own children, and the child has learned to despise his parents as he knows from early on that his well-being is dependent not so much on them as on that image on a picture. He has achieved the peculiar status of being African through and through yet also being American, Swedish or British while living in the mud hut with his parents.
The implications of this kind of upbringing in an age when African countries are apparently 'independent' are hard to imagine. Is a child not being taught from year dot, that he is unfortunate to be born in Africa, but that all good things come from abroad? Is there not a risk that such children will never come to value their own country or people, until they have first learned to despise those who gave them a hope, that later dwindled and died?
The child sponsorship schemes often focus strongly on providing children with education. This education that is provided is however generally rooted in foreign languages and countries, so is hard to understand for local children. They can typically only get to benefit from this education either my corrupt means or by coming to be employed in the formal or international sector. An educational system may mushroom, but then leave its students frustrated, as there are still only the same numbers of jobs available in the international sector. This sponsored child has two options. Either to despise his own people, or perhaps later on to despise those who paid for him to be brought up in such a way as to give him so much false hope and perhaps to have ruined his future.
These child sponsorship schemes certainly save lives and give someone a 'quality' of life that they otherwise wouldn't have had. But I am dubious as to the long-term effects of the unnatural mind-set that children remain with.