I sponsor a child. Calling me a ‘white saviour' is preposterous and offensive

Yahoo

01-05-2025

No good deed goes unpunished. A hoary old chestnut, that one, delivered with a sigh, a wry smile, maybe an eye roll. I've used it myself; most recently when I offered to sort out my neighbour's recycling and the bag split. It's always the little things, eh?
Well not any more. What was once just a tired turn of phrase is starting to look like an incontrovertible fact. Hand on heart, is there any sphere in modern life in which we aren't being reproached, harangued and scolded?
Feeding ducks the odd crust is wicked and will poison them. Reading Roald Dahl (not a nice man) to your kids constitutes corruption. Thinking of treating the in-laws to a summer performance of The Two Gentlemen of Verona in Stratford-upon-Avon? Ha! That's exactly what a white supremacist would do.
This week's moral brickbat comes courtesy of Save The Children, which tersely announced it was calling time on the sponsorship of young people in developing countries, amid criticisms the scheme was a 'legacy of colonialism'.
Come again? I've sponsored children for years through the amazing UK-based charity Plan International and I can say with copper-bottomed conviction that I was not motivated by racist tropes, a desire for cultural dominance, profiteering or exploitation.
I was paying for stationery and shoes, healthcare and a future for a little Indian boy in an Indian village so remote it had no electricity and could only be reached cross-country in a jeep.
When I visited Pobrito back in 2000, I brought his mother tea in a fancy Big Ben tin and gave him a Manchester United football. He had never heard of Manchester United. He's all grown up now – I hope he is flourishing.
My sponsorship, which began in 1992, was transferred on to various other children down the years. I never stipulate a country; I just ask to be assigned a child where the need is greatest.
Then in 2007, Plan International launched 'Because I'm a Girl', to tackle gender inequalities, so I added another sponsorship and was allocated Sheyla, in the desert of northern Peru.
Being a sponsored child – there may be more than 100 in any settlement – is considered an honour and the community decides which families should be given the distinction; they are usually the very poorest.
Moreover my money – £15 in 2007 and now £20 a month – does not go directly to any child or family; it is the whole community that benefits. I am proud that some of my cash went towards drilling a well and providing a village tap, which meant little girls like Sheyla and her sisters no longer spent their days – lives – endlessly fetching water from the river and could go to school with their brothers. A legacy of colonialism? Really?
Like all sponsors, I simply wanted to reach out and give a child, a family, a community a leg up. I took my daughter, Lily, to Peru to show her how other girls live. The memory will never leave her and so, I hope, another generation of girls will support those who need it.
Sponsors are people who have, sharing with people who have not – which is surely the most basic of human responses? It feels like a betrayal for this act of empathy, of decency, to be decried by people such as the Canadian academic Prof Kathy Nolan, author of a paper called Moving Beyond Child Sponsorship.
'It makes people feel good and therefore they feel let off the hook and can continue with their privileged lives,' she said this week. 'What we don't realise is that many of the benefits we have in the global North are due to structural issues that have caused the children these people are sponsoring to be suffering.'
I don't feel let off any hook. I just feel dismayed at her bleak – and undeserved – portrayal of sponsors like me. Was Save the Children in the US, which took the decision to axe all sponsorships, influenced by her forthright opinions on what she baldly (inaccurately) refers to as the 'marketing of children'?
Certainly, Save the Children's new stance is a major turnaround. Having first pioneered the whole concept of sponsorship in the early 1900s, the charity now wants to focus on promoting 'inclusion and greater equity' – whatever that means – and so has tersely informed its donors they can no longer support or even correspond with the children and young people they have come to know, sometimes over many years.
Estimates suggest that individual sponsorship programmes bring in over £2 billion to charities around the world annually; these regular donations are veritable gold dust as it means organisations can strategise and plan ahead.
And why are monthly donors like me so reliable? Because we have built a relationship with a child, a family, a community. We give, month after month, year after year, because we care and, even in a cost of living crisis, we strive to honour the obligation we have made.
Sheyla's community is deemed to be no longer in need of sponsorship, which is a success in itself. I now sponsor seven-year-old Ahilyn in Ecuador and 12-year-old Reday in Bangladesh.
How cynical to denigrate my (and others) unwavering commitment as nothing more than a way to salve my conscience.
I'm in the fortunate position where I can afford donations to other charities every month but it is the precious links to these sponsored children that I treasure the most. I come into their lives, letters are exchanged, shoes bought, sometimes visits made. Then, when the community is up on its feet, my involvement ends.
It's not about ego. It's about doing what's right. And whatever woke criticism is hurled towards those of us who quietly sponsor children across the globe, these good deeds do not deserve to be punished.
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