Child's i Foundation - we make families not orphans

Promoting Adoption in Uganda … with the help of our worldwide community.

Adoption here in Uganda is relatively uncommon and, sadly, there is a real stigma attached to it. A brilliant journalist, Angela Kintu, wrote a very brave article in the Sunday Vision about her personal experiences of adoption and backlash she endured when she chose to adopt her baby. It received so much attention she wrote another article about how adoption changed her life.

Once children arrive at our centre, we do everything we can to trace their families but, when we are unsuccessful, our aim is to place them in new families as soon as possible. The purpose of our pilot media campaign was to see if we could change the mindsets of Ugandans to encourage them to adopt instead of  hundreds of children languishing in orphanages across Uganda. We knew we were not going to change minds over night, but we wanted to create a debate. This is how we did it…

In the spirit of Child’s i Foundation, we created a media campaign using the time, love and money of our worldwide community of volunteers. This campaign would not have been possible without Martha Parsons, an ITN Journalist from the UK, who volunteered five months of her time and expertise to produce the campaign.

First of all, we needed a website – step forward Anu Gupta, a brilliant web developer from the UK who gave up his Easter to build (thanks to Wordpress) our Ugandan’s Adopt website for free.

We filled our website with powerful videos to encourage adoption, produced by media volunteers from around the world who come and give their TV expertise for free. Thanks to Ian Warren, Kirsty Mitchell, Katie Cochrane, Josie Gallo, Barbara Graham, Liam Stewart, Keren Riley and Manu Lorenzone. This powerful video was filmed by Keren Riley and produced by Manu Lorenzone and Martha Parsons.

We wanted to give Ugandan parents adoption packs to take home full of information about the process and an expression of interest form. For those, we thank designer Becci Buckley, who designed them.

Our Billboard campaign can only be described as a truly collaborative effort. We had 24 hours to come up with a campaign idea, so we posted a plea on our Facebook group to find an advertising creative. Creative Gordon Roberts stepped forward and worked on a brilliant campaign idea “Love is All They Need…Adopt A Child’  while Jessica Rodriguez and Stijn Aelbers offered their time to take pictures of our children.

George and Desire (Joey’s Parents) offered to front our campaign and we paid for a designer to design the billboard. Alliance Media very kindly gave us the Billboards for free and we had to pay for printing and flighting, which came to £831 and designer Martha Anyango Oringo very generously gave us a 50% discount.

Next we wanted to hit the airwaves and who better to ask than the incredible Dave Wartnaby (remember the guy who came out to Uganda and set up a studio on his bed?) Dave is the voice of Capital FM in Uganda and, over the past 18 months, has not charged them a penny for his lovely voice – instead he asked them to give us the airtime instead.  He also persuaded Jo McCrostie at This Is Global agency to write our script, while Dave produced our radio adverts. Thanks also to Jackie Lumbasi, who is constantly on Capital FM promoting our adoption campaign and the guys at Radio Simba, who gave us a very reasonable price to promote our campaign.

Our adverts promoting adoption on Uganda’s leading TV station NTV have been very successful, and we’ve received many calls from prospective adoptive parents. Here are both our adverts produced by Manu Lorenzone and Martha Parsons.

Our hour-long NTV debate show with Mr James Kaboggoza, Desire our adoptive parents and our social worker Barbra was hugely informative and the phone lines were jammed with callers wanting to know more. We are very grateful for Henry Kyomu for filming and Ben Ssebuufu  for presenting on the vidoes.

We could not have done this campaign without the backing of the Ministry of Gender, Labour and Social Development, ANPPCAN, CRANE, Families For Children and Carol Bankusha, who have helped us develop this pilot over the past year.

I think we can confidently say it has been incredibly successful. Every one of you who has given your love, time and money should be very proud of what you’ve achieved. We already have 60 families being assessed, but this is just the beginning.  The mindset towards adoption is not going to change overnight, but the 60 families who have already volunteered may well encourage even more families to step forward so we can find homes for more children in desperate need of love and stability.

Next stop is presentations, so if you would like our team to visit your business or church and do a presentation, please do get in touch email adoption@childsifoundation.org

or call 0791777319

Many thanks – we couldn’t do this without you