South Africa

MaAfrika Tikkun, a South African NGO working primarily with orphans and other vulnerable children and home-based caregivers, partnered with Lifeline Energy in 2004.  We provided 300 solar and wind-up Lifeline radios to orphans and vulnerable children in the Gauteng and Western Cape. The children lived in peri-urban shack settlements and faced daily hardships including poverty, disease, substance abuse, domestic violence and poor infrastructure. Through providing access to information, the radios supported MaAfrika Tikkun’s work in palliative home-based care, orphan care, early childhood development and life skills training during after-school informal educational activities. The radios offered opportunity to form listening groups and to discuss issues pertinent to them allowing them to make informed decisions. For many orphans and vulnerable children, with the violence that currently exists in townships in South Africa, our radios provided them with factual information, enabling them to make more informed decisions. These vulnerable children were starved for information and relied on the voices on the radio to share with them the daily happenings around them.  (These children had no access to mobile phones.)