Through the Eyes of the Sponsored

Abstract

Child sponsorship (CS) international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) have a long history of using individual change stories in their marketing materials. However, a feature of the ongoing debate over the merits of CS-funded programmes is the reality that those parts of the discussion accessible in published literature have often been dominated by Northern journalists, aid industry insiders and academics. Often, the perspectives and lived experiences of those who are, or who have been sponsored in the South, have been marginalized and pushed to the periphery of discussion by experts in their haste to pass judgment on the legitimacy of CS-funded interventions. Yet, of all the perspectives on CS one might explore, perhaps one we should consider to be equally significant, is that of sponsored children and previously sponsored adults. The lived experience of those who grew up within a CS scheme, their own analysis of that experience, and the impact the experience has had on their lives, is an important set of perspectives to capture in a volume of this nature.