All children deserve the best start in life: nurturing homes and safe places to play and learn, nutritional food, and quality medical and emotional care.
However, many of these rights are out of reach for the 1 in 5 children who live in poverty worldwide. For these precious children, life is incredibly challenging as they contend with the threats of illiteracy, disease, child labour, lifelong poverty and even death.
“The Messenger of Allah (SAW) said: ‘I and the one who looks after an orphan will be like this in Paradise,’ showing his middle and index fingers and separating them.”
[Bukhari]
In the case of death, sponsorship may be transferred to a sibling if they are of sponsorship age.
In each family, one child in every two can be sponsored, providing of course that sponsors can be found. This can be modified by the field office upon approval of the Child Welfare Department if there is a particular need for more children within a family to be supported.
The Orphans General Fund is a unique resource that works to support caregiving families of orphans to break the chains of poverty and allows Islamic Relief the flexibility to send emergency aid or develop innovative programming that addresses the unique needs of children within their communities.
We use your orphan charity to ensure child-friendly safe spaces, empower communities, and develop long-term solutions to poverty and critical issues like child labour and child marriage.
Through this fund, we support children across the globe in a variety of ways, including:
This fund also enables us to respond to the urgent medical requirements of orphans and their caregiving families – covering the costs of emergency care, travel to hospitals, prescriptions and medical equipment such as wheelchairs, hearing aids and eyewear. Orphans affected by chronic and long-term illnesses like asthma and diabetes are also supported through this fund.
When the call for relief comes, your contributions to this fund mean that we will be ready to serve immediately, efficiently and effectively.