PRojects directory

Umtha Welanga

Strategic Focus: Emotional & Social Support
Where: South Africa

Umtha Welanga is a small community organisation which offers a loving future to orphans in the sprawling township of Khayelitsha, Cape Town. Since they opened in 2000, they have enabled hundreds of children (both those infected and affected by AIDS) to move successfully into long term foster or extended family care. For many HIV+ or disabled children, institutional care has been seen as the only option for them. It is assumed that private individuals will not take on the emotional and medical responsibility of looking after these kids. However, Umtha Welanga has shown otherwise by pioneering an effective identification, training and support system for over 100 local foster and extended families living in Khayelitsha.

For more information on this project, please download this one-pager.

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We see hope in Cosma.

Cosma is 23. When he was 19, he was living in Kampala, Uganda and because he hadn’t finished school, was only able to get casual jobs. His pastor told him about Net2Work, an IT skills course run by HOPEHIV partner Oasis. After he finished the course, he and a fellow graduate opened an e-academy at their church. Oasis spotted his potential and asked him to be a trainer for the new Net2Work course for former child soldiers in Gulu, in the war-torn north of the country.

Cosma told us, ‘This work in Gulu has given me joy and hope. I was initially fearful of coming to Gulu as I had heard all these stories of the atrocities. When I arrived the students seemed rude but I saw they were just traumatized young people who needed me to build a relationship with them.’ Cosma uses part of his salary to pay his younger brother’s school fees. In 2008 one of his 150 Gulu graduates became a teacher at the newly opened Net2Work academy for former child soldiers in Pader.

Find out more about Net2Work.