why we exist
There is a huge need.
Despite incredible gains in health, education, and economic growth, many communities across eastern and southern Africa still face significant interlinked challenges posed by poverty, HIV and AIDS, child marriage, poor quality education, poor nutrition, lack of health care, and more. These challenges disproportionately impact children and youth, who are unable to realize their full potential. In fact, more than half of the 50 million out-of-school children live in Africa, and there are approximately 32.1 million children in Africa who are either single- or double-parent orphans. At the same time, approximately 38% of girls in sub-Saharan Africa are married before the age of 18.
There is a huge opportunity.
By 2050, one in every three children under the age of 18 will be African. By 2030, in most African countries, there will be more young adults than the elderly, and according to UNICEF, it will be the region with the greatest number of children under 18, making up 40% of the world’s child population. It is essential to ensure that these children and youth are living in safe, strong, nurturing environments that prepare them to participate in growing economic opportunities.
Traditional aid is broken.
While large multi-national and institutional efforts and the work of NGOs and individuals have yielded many improvements on the continent, these outside interventions often can be piecemeal, short-term, and implemented without the input of the very people they are hoping to serve. Moreover, they are often not sustained after the donors exit – leaving pockets of deep inequity in the region, especially in rural communities.
Community-based solutions hold the key.
Children live best when supported by nurturing families and communities. Thus, while children are at the core of why Firelight exists, we focus our work on building the capacity of catalytic community-based organizations that are born from and embedded within a community. These organizations more deeply understand community needs than outside actors, and they are best placed to identify solutions that serve vulnerable children and the families and communities that care for them.
As our founders learned early on, and as our work shows us on a daily basis, community-based organizations are among the greatest assets in creating safe, strong, nurturing environments for children and youth – while also empowering communities to change the fundamental systems that impact them.
Enduring, transformative change requires an approach of justice and solidarity
Fundamentally, we believe that transformative change in global development necessitates stances of justice and solidarity, in contrast to the current models of charity and aid.
Philanthropy has long been considered a form of charity or aid, in which those with wealth and resources identify worthy causes and donate to them. Often these funds are given with considerable restrictions around how they may be spent, and are accompanied by a long list of requirements for monitoring, reporting, and evidence of results.
This charity approach to global development is deeply flawed. Despite good intentions and generally thoughtful implementation, charity approaches often involve symptomatic and short-term fixes, and usually do not address underlying systemic issues or root causes. Moreover, power tends to lie with the donor who determines who is worthy of receiving funds, how the funds may be used, and how success is defined. This results in initiatives, approaches, strategies, and actions that are deemed appropriate by usually Global North, white, wealthy people – whose perspectives and lenses are at best limited and narrow, but at worst biased and even self-interested in maintaining underlying social and economic structures.
A justice approach to global development, on the other hand, is about fairness, rights, and the equitable distribution of money, opportunities, and power among all members of society. With a justice approach, symptomatic and reactive fixes are inadequate – it is necessary to expose and redress that which is unfair and inequitable. Justice approaches often go hand in hand with a commitment of solidarity – the sense that we are all responsible to fight injustice towards ourselves and others. This sense of solidarity is more in line with the original meaning of the word ‘philanthropy’ – that is, love of one’s fellow humanity.
Community-driven systems change – the approach that Firelight takes in all of its work - as an approach is a clear way to operationalize justice and solidarity. It requires donors and other holders of power and wealth to walk with, and even be guided by, people and communities, in the messy, gradual, difficult, and long term work of creating both small and large shifts in underlying systems and norms. This is what it means to be in solidarity with others towards a more just and equitable world.