The AfriKids Way

Ensuring the protection of all children and their rights is the reason AfriKids exists and our up most priority. We have robust measures in place to protect people, particularly children and vulnerable adults, from any harm that may be caused by AfriKids’ work or people involved with it. We are also actively inclusive and work to dismantle systemic discrimination, fostering a thriving, diverse community of stakeholders than can achieve more together.

We will not trivialise the injustice of poverty or compromise the dignity of anyone we work with through ‘pity advertising’ or by using inappropriate images or language when discussing sensitive issues. We hope sharing the positive stories of how our work is making a difference will inspire people to help us do more.

Our team of local staff in Ghana design and run all of our life-changing programmes from start to finish. Qualified, experienced professionals, they have a deep, personal commitment to improving life for children in their communities and being known and trusted by the communities they work in is what makes them so effective, especially with some of our most complex work changing harmful traditional beliefs and practices. Fundraising and donor due diligence is led from the UK, but all to support local people delivering the right solutions in their own communities.

Our programmes are developed by listening to what local people tell us they really need. Our exceptional stakeholder consultation gives every level of society a say on what we do and gives us a clear view on what the government and other actors are doing. This ensures our projects are always truly needed, wanted and bought into by everyone it takes to make them work. 

Our approach is always to help children, families and communities help themselves. Our projects bring people together, equip them with knowledge and show them how to make and demand the changes needed for all children to have a better life in northern Ghana. 

If it’s not sustainable, it’s not development.

For us, this means two things:

Addressing the root causes of issues as well as the symptoms. As well as providing direct support to children at risk now, we are also driving systemic change, to stop suffering in the first place, and improve every child’s start in life.

Creating changes that are sustainable without ongoing aid. All of our projects create change by educating local people and empowering them to make changes themselves. This way the changes we help make with each new project become permanently embedded and continue to benefit children long after our involvement ends. While there is a lot of work to be done and making permanent changes take time, our projects will evolve and move, rather than create a dependence on us and aid for changes to be sustained.

We are fiercely committed to 100% accountability for all of the money we receive and spend in the UK and Ghana. We maintain robust governance policies and procedures including regular internal and external audits to ensure this. We publish independently audited accounts annually and encourage donors to ask us anything, anytime.

By working with others, we can have a greater impact. We collaborate with partners across the NGO, public and private sectors to maximise the reach and impact of our projects. We continuously develop our knowledge and skills by working with and learning from others, sharing what we know so that they too can learn from us. 

We work together with communities to end harmful traditional practices and protect children, while respecting local culture, heritage and environment. We are conscious to minimise the impact of our operations on the environment.

An ethos of learning and improving is ingrained in everything we do, from continuous staff training to robust Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning tools that measure our impact and show us how we can do better. We actively invite feedback from all of our stakeholders.