“I and the one who looks after an orphan and provides for him, will be in Paradise like these two” – and he gestured with his forefinger and middle finger, holding them close together.’’ (Bukhari)
When you sponsor an orphan with Human Appeal, you enable a child to go to school, eat well, and stay safe, warm, and healthy, providing the foundations needed for a brighter future. Adopting an orphan in our sponsorship programme provides a child with some of the life supporting benefits of being in a family, however far away.
You can give monthly for £35, or annually for £420 – that’s 12 months of blessings packed into a single donation. Plus, our orphan sponsorship programme is Zakat-eligible, so you can fulfill this pillar of Islam whilst helping a vulnerable child.
The worldwide orphan crisis
It is estimated that there are over 100 million orphans worldwide, with 5,700 children becoming orphans every day due to war, natural disaster, poverty, disease, and lack of access to medical care.
Although 250,000 children are adopted every year, 14,050,000 orphans will grow up without ever having been part of a loving family. Every day, 38,493 children age out of an orphanage. Every 2.2 seconds a child leaves an orphanage or foster care with no family to belong to and no place to call home.
With less than 1% of all orphan children adopted into loving families, our support is needed to care for the rest of the world’s millions of orphaned, abandoned, and homeless children.
How sponsorship honours a Prophetic tradition
In his lifetime, the Messenger of Allah (PBUH) - himself an orphan - emphasized caring for orphans and promised those who did so a special place in Jannah. It's a testament to the beauty of supporting the world’s most vulnerable - the children who have lost their caregivers.
Our sponsorship is one-to-one, meaning that you individually support a single, specified child. When you adopt an orphan in our sponsorship programme, you’ll receive two reports each year (we’re the only charity to do this) advising you how your orphan child is doing. You’ll learn about their housing, education, favourite subjects, and hobbies. You’ll even receive a drawing or letter from them.
Trust our experience and child-focused care
Trust Human Appeal’s 32 years of expertise in nurturing orphaned children. Across all 14 countries where we sponsor orphans, we have a dedicated child safeguarding officer in place. All staff working with children receive comprehensive training in child protection. Our local staff check in on all sponsored orphans to make sure they are well, in school, and receiving the care you intended, and we transparently report back to you how the child is in your biannual reports.
We also train mothers and caregivers on child protection, helping them to protect these orphans from common risks. We also work to help families with orphans in other ways, such as training widowed mothers to create a livelihood to support her orphaned children.
Today, our adopters sponsor 23,000 orphans in 14 countries, including Albania, Iraq, Lebanon, Morocco, Nigeria, North Macedonia, Pakistan, Palestine, Sri Lanka, Somalia, Syria, Tunisia, Turkey, and Yemen.
Your sponsorship is a mercy to a child, helping them to break the cycle of poverty, and give them the opportunity that all children deserve – a chance to be healthy, protected, and educated. Importantly, sponsorship also ensures they get to stay in school, so that they don’t have to work to support themselves and their families.
Entrust your sponsorship to our 30 years of experience in caring for orphaned children. Be a mercy to an orphaned child, and each month you support a child, you’ll receive blessings too. £35/$50 per month helps to cover the cost of:
• food
• shelter
• clothes,
• healthcare, and
• school supplies.
You can also give your sponsorship in a one-off annual payment of £420/$600 per year.
Funds received via the 1-2-1 Sponsorship programme are given to the orphan child’s primary carer, whether this is the child’s mother or a family guardian. The mother or guardian has discretion to spend the funds on the child’s wellbeing, education, shelter or living arrangements. The spending of each household varies from one family to the next.
Yes, if the child you sponsor is old enough and able, then the child you sponsor will most definitely be attending school as per our 1-2-1 Sponsorship programme criteria.
Due to our safeguarding measures and policy, we do not allow donors to contact the orphan child. We provide you with updates on the child’s development and growth twice per year, so you can know the impact your funds are making on the child’s life. However, we do not allow direct contact for the child’s betterment.
The donor will receive two reports each year on the progress of the child's development and updated photos. We do not have the function to allow donors to write to the children at this moment in time. We do not encourage donor visits to the orphans either due to safeguarding issues. While we understand that donors want to meet the children or speak to them often, this requires safeguarding measures to be in place that will allow us to ensure the child and their mother/guardian is always protected.
We currently issue mid-year and annual reports; these include updated pictures of the child, as well as information on their current wellbeing and performance in school.
By sponsoring a child you are providing monetary assistance to ensure they have access to a quality education and a better quality of life. However, this is not like adopting a child as you have limited or no access to the child directly. They are aware of your sponsorship and will be receiving the donations; in turn you will receive two reports a year on the child’s progress.
An orphan child is a child without a father or both parents.
You can sponsor an orphan child by visiting our website and setting up a direct debit or making an annual donation. You can also call us and our donor care team will assist you in sponsoring a child.
Yes, you can sponsor as many as you like.
We do not sponsor orphans in the UK but in developing countries across the globe instead.
Yes, however you must specify this when making the donation so we can ensure that we can apply this.
Yes, we have Human Appeal Offices throughout the world that you can sponsor via. Our HQ is in the UK and you can sponsor directly from our website.
We apply a strict programme criteria for orphan sponsorship programmes, all child must meet our minimum requirements for the orphan sponsorship programme so that we can ensure we are reaching orphans most in need.
The primary benefit is the child receiving a quality education, and that by providing monetary support the funds are spent on improving their quality of life.
Our programme stipulates that the child must be in education, while the mother or guardian of the child has discretion to spend the funds to as they deem necessary to support their local needs.
You can send additional monies to the child by either setting up a second fund for the child or via one off donations. Due to the design of our programme, we advise you send monetary gifts so that the guardian or mother of the child can buy gifts for the orphan according to their local needs.
The Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) said: “I and the one who sponsors an orphan will be in Paradise like these two” – and he gestured with his forefinger and middle finger, holding them close together.
In Islam, sponsoring an orphaned child is one of the most righteous deeds a Muslim can perform.
Human Appeal is committed to providing aid in the country or programme that you select. In the event we complete the programme, exceed the required funds, or are denied access to a particular country for reasons beyond our control, Human Appeal reserves the right to reallocate your donation to another programme where it is needed most.
