A Compassion UK Trustee has come to the defence of child sponsorship prevalent in many Christian organizations following a recent announcement by ActionAid that it will rethink its child sponsorship programmes that have been running since 1972.
In a LinkedIn post, Dr. Richmond Wandera, a Compassion beneficiary himself, offers a contrasting view based on personal experience. While Wandera acknowledged the risks of Western-centred models that ActionAid and other organisations want to move away from, he argues that child sponsorship can create a regenerative cycle of change when genuinely community-led.
Wandera draws on his own childhood to challenge the idea that child sponsorship is inherently harmful. “I grew up in extreme poverty in Uganda, often hungry, sick, and unable to access education. Compassion, partnered with my local Church, where leaders understood our family’s specific needs. My sister and I were supported through sponsorship, and this locally led intervention changed the trajectory of our family,” recalled Wandera.
Now serving as a trustee of Compassion UK, Wandera is at the centre of ensuring programs remain rooted in lived experience and strengthen local leadership. “Effective sponsorship works when it equips community leaders to become innovators, enabling them to address the systemic causes of poverty in their own contexts rather than relying on external solutions,” notes Wandera.
He observes a growing pattern across multiple countries, where networks of formerly sponsored children are reinvesting their skills and education back into their communities. Wandera maintains that rather than reproducing dependency, these programs help replace "a cycle of inter-generational poverty" with one marked by thriving young adults leading local transformation
Rethinking decades-old model
ActionAid’s new direction, reported by The Guardian, aims to end child sponsorship in international development as part of broader efforts to “decolonize” its work, raising questions about whether traditional sponsorship reinforces old power imbalances between Western donors and communities in the Global South.
The Guardian reported that child sponsorship schemes allowing donors to handpick children in poor countries can carry racialized, paternalistic undertones and need transformation.
ActionAid UK co-chief executives Taahra Ghazi and Hannah Bond outlined their vision for change. Ghazi argued that traditional child sponsorship often mirrors unequal power dynamics, noting that many donors are comparatively wealthy and predominantly white, while the children represented are usually black or brown and from the Global South.
When supporters select a child's photograph and country, the relationship becomes a transaction that can feel paternalistic, Ghazi explained. For ActionAid, this recognition has prompted an acknowledgement that the model belongs to an earlier era and no longer reflects how the organization wants to engage with communities today.
"We are evolving the model so it is shaped by community voices and responds to the realities they face today," Bond explained. "We value our sponsors and remain committed to making sure their support continues to have a real impact."
Save the Children, another aid organization prominent in Africa, has also pivoted from its child sponsorship program to adopt broader community support.
"After several years of internal consultation and review, we have found that the operational costs associated with traditional child sponsorship (delivering letters and updates on thousands of kids) meant less funding going directly to programs and, thus, to children," the organization stated in an announcement.
The organization added that challenges like extreme weather, conflict and growing inequality are leading more children and families to migrate, and the traditional sponsorship model lacks the flexibility to respond to their needs.
Save the Children now moves toward a more flexible and unrestricted approach, allowing resources to be used more efficiently to meet the shared and most urgent needs of children and their communities today.
World Vision, on its part, revised its child sponsorship programme in 2019 when it flipped the process by empowering potential beneficiaries (parents and children) to choose a potential benefactor by flipping through profiles of partners.
Research from Plan International lends weight to Wandera’s arguments that child sponsorship, when delivered through long-term, community-based programs, can produce meaningful benefits for both children and the communities around them.
The organization's 2024 Changing Lives study concludes that sponsorship contributes positively to development outcomes, though its effects vary by context. Rather than operating as a narrow, individualized intervention, the research frames sponsorship as part of a broader ecosystem of support that strengthens local systems, services and social awareness over time.
The findings point to concrete improvements in adolescent wellbeing and protection. Across all research sites, sponsored adolescents reported generally good health, with particularly strong results in Uganda, where self-reported good health among adolescents in Plan International communities was 19 percent higher than in comparison areas.
In Bangladesh, the study found higher levels of child-protection awareness, with more than 91 percent of adolescents in Plan-supported communities saying they knew where to report harm to children, compared with 82 percent in non-supported sites.
A recent commentary paper by Mary Ann Macmillan, an Assistant Professor in the Criminal Justice Department at Azusa Pacific University in the United States, discussed the influence of well-intentioned Western aid toward orphan care mainly targeted at vulnerable children in East Africa and Asia.
Macmillan, drawing from her experience, argued that the Western rescue narrative frames children's hardship as “personal tragedy instead of the consequences of poverty, conflict, or systemic failures. It assumes that children lack parents, families, or futures unless outside benefactors intervene.”
These sponsorships and what she calls the "orphan economy" ignore the wider issues that have resulted in the neglect of children, Macmillan observed.
The debate over child sponsorship reveals tension between acknowledging historical power imbalances and recognizing models that have demonstrably worked in specific contexts. While ActionAid and Save the Children move toward community-focused approaches that prioritize flexibility and local leadership, voices like Dr. Wandera's remind the sector that some sponsorship programs have already achieved those goals when designed and implemented with genuine community partnership.
