International Humanitarian Organization
Sponsorship as our principle of operation
Children of the Mekong is an International Humanitarian Organisation that works on the principal of child sponsorship.
But what is child sponsorship?
It allows the doors of education to be opened to the child you sponsor. The sponsorship can provide the sponsored child, not only with education, but with basic living necessities such as food and clothing. It enables you to form a meaningful bond with the child through watching them grow as individuals. You can communicate with them through letters and emails, as well as going to meet them in person.
To find out the different ways to sponsor a child, please visit here.
Do you wish to know more about us as an International Humanitarian Organisation?
Our Main Principles of Action
- Love before helping: Children of the Mekong attaches importance to the encounter, to the personal touch, to meeting face to face, to the relationship and the friendship. We seek a balance between being and doing.
- Joy in the way you communicate: all too often, humanitarian NGOs base their communication on misery in order to make potential donors feel pain and guilt. On the contrary, we believe that ‘there is more joy in seeing a child at school than on the street’. Behind a terrible and abject reality, there are glimmers of hope.
- Respond to the need rather than create it: one of the most significant challenge of International Humanitarian Organizations is the fine line between aid and patronizing western interference . However, at Children of the Mekong, the needs emerge from the local population themselves. We then try to respond to those needs with minimal bias.
- Go where no one will go: our aim is to support those most in need, those left behind. Discover the children who are waiting, who need your help, in our sponsorship programmes.
5. Take into account the way of life of the families before helping them: above all, we do not want to create a harmful gap of between the before and after the support. Therefore, we adapt our actions to cater to the specific lifestyles of each family.
- No compromise and freedom of action: governments in some countries can be corrupt. If this leads to the aid to the poorest to be compromised, we choose to act in an unofficial capacity.
- Help in concrete terms: Children of the Mekong is determined to help in pragmatic and feasible ways and to stay away from ambiguous visions or ineffective theories.
- Involve locally: our actions are indeed based on cooperative development in order to involve the beneficiaries, the leaders, and the companies in each of our projects as much as possible. The goal is for the target groups to take ownership to the point where our presence would not be necessary.
- Education in all its forms: we believe that education and a child’s development go beyond academic classes delivered in our education centres. That is why we also offer professional training and skill building as well as the necessary personal support that allows the child to fully flourish.
- Support over time: thanks to the system of child sponsorship, Children of the Mekong is able to guarantee a real follow-up of the children who are helped. The objective is therefore not to leave after a few years, but to accompany them over the long term and to follow their growth as individuals.
11. To strengthen the community and family spirit: as Children of the Mekong is a real family and we value such connection, we aim to continue to nurture the bond that we have created across the globe.
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Find out more about our child sponsorship programmes
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