Compassion International, a global Christian-based organisation, traces its roots to the passionate convictions of Reverend Swanson Everett, who was deployed by the American military to provide chaplaincy services during the Korean War in 1952. As the war raged, Swanson was heartbroken when he observed thousands displaced from their homes and lodging on the town streets. Orphaned children outnumbered adults, and many died due to a lack of basic life necessities and the extreme cold weather. Inspired by the biblical scripture: “When He saw the crowds, He had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd” (Mathew 9:36, NIV), Swanson birthed a charity organisation that, as of 2024, was supporting 2.3 million vulnerable children in 29 countries worldwide ([7]).

To raise resources to support vulnerable children, Compassion International currently networks with 9000 local Christian congregations who offer voluntary professional services to nurture children, 1600 music artists and sportspeople who use their platforms to generate donor funds, 15,000 churches that offer sponsorship support to children, and alliance partner organisations that get involved in the child nurture programme design. Globally, 1.67 million individual donors from “Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, the Philippines, Portugal, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States” extend sponsorship support to vulnerable children ([6]: p. 6).

It is clear that since its inception, Compassion International has greatly expanded and is doing commendable work globally to support vulnerable groups in society in walking out of economic poverty. The International organisation boasts of 1.67 million individual sponsors who support the mission in various ways. However, a review of the sponsors’ geographic locations shows that none are from Africa ([6]: p. 6, 9). Could it be that people on the African continent are yet to be envisioned to join the donor community, or is their provision of voluntary labour and space to nurture vulnerable children sufficient?

Compassion International programme outputs are child-focused, Christ-nurture-centred, and dedicated to partnerships with local evangelical Christian communities. Compassion International, guided by Christian moral teachings, works with local Christian congregations and affiliated partner organisations to empower vulnerable children and their caregivers with spiritual, vocational, physical health, and cognitive skills to alleviate economic poverty. The empowerment is a curricular, child- and youth-stage-managed programme for ages 1 to 22 years ([6]: pp. 4-8).

“Compassion believes holistic development is a long-term approach that starts before a child is born and continues through to school age and beyond.” As such, staged growth activities are curriculum rolled out to empower pregnant mothers, caregivers, and vulnerable children with cognitive, spiritual, physical, economic, and social relationship skills. In developing the children’s nurture curriculum, grassroots implementing church leaderships are equipped with organisational management skills to design relevant programmes for their diverse local settings ([4] pp. 6-10).

At the core of Compassion International’s child development agenda is addressing the life-robbing challenges that manifest in children’s households, their cultural environments, and the surrounding interconnected society. The interconnected social environments are believed to be saturated with challenges that affect children’s early survival and progressive growth. To mitigate the challenges, the critical areas of intervention include: the provision of clean water, emergency medical care, nutritional therapeutic interventions, infrastructure support, and vocational training, so that young people graduate from the sponsorship programme when they are emotionally stable, spiritually mature, and professionally empowered to lead fulfilled and self-sustaining lives ([4]pp. 10-12).

To measure the global impact of Compassion International, 99 alumni from the Dominican Republic were surveyed in 2024. The study found that 97% moved out of economic poverty, 95% developed self-esteem skills, 95% achieved their educational goals, 95% gained the confidence to confront life’s challenges with a smile, and that, for 93%, their moral lives changed for the better ([7]).

The findings are exciting. If such findings are replicable in all countries where Compassion is at work, then great work has been done to shape the vocational destiny of the young. However, the extent to which graduates apply the skills they have acquired to attain economic independence and contribute to the financial sustainability and growth of the local Christian congregations and the national umbrella organisations that supported them is not spelt in the rolled-out study report.

Compassion International operates in 10 African countries: Burkina Faso, Ghana, Togo, Zambia, Malawi, Tanzania, Kenya, Ethiopia, Rwanda, and Uganda ([6] p. 9). The annual report, released in 2025 and focusing on Africa, highlighted that 18,586 of the 1,019,187 children registered for sponsorship support since the programme’s inception had survived. This means that 98% accounting for 1,000,601 children dropped out of the sponsorship programme before attaining vocational skills, or had double sponsorship and were deleted from the programme, or they deliberately exited from the programme. Next, 1408 of 4132 church partnerships survived, meaning that 2724 (66%) were terminated due to financial misconduct or, less likely, due to natural disasters ([8]: p. v).

However, the low survival rate of children in the sponsorship programme is questionable. Probably the sponsorship support conditions were unbearable, or the mode of child mentorship programmes was not context-friendly to African communal resource-sharing and knowledge-transfer methods.

A critical examination of the philosophy promoted by Compassion International to empower vulnerable African children with the skills to overcome economic poverty is rooted in European Christianity. The European Christian approach, which conveys foreign thought convictions, has, to a certain extent, helped some attain their goals, but to many, the Christian moral values emphasised in the programme curricula are foreign. This could explain why many children are enrolled in the programme: some drop out, but few graduate.

Another challenge that may be contributing to children dropping out of the sponsorship programme could be connected to the religious rivalries between Christians and Muslims. In Africa, Christianity and Islam are intertwined with traditional African religions. While African religion displays the undeniable genetic makeup of all Africans, European Christianity and Arabian Islam have never been incorporated into African language concepts and thought patterns. Certainly, promoting European-crafted Christ-centred teachings that are foreign to African Christians and sidelining the African Muslim community is a disregard for the cultural ideals that bind Africans as a people of Black Culture. Of course, Compassion International focuses on working alongside local Christian congregations engaged in conversions, but such an approach denies the poverty-stricken, indifferent religious others the opportunity to access services that could help them escape economic poverty.

As a matter of fact, the approach used by the African cultural universe to instil constructive moral values and to bond people is not visible in the curriculum design promoted by external funders of Compassion International programmes in Africa. On the contrary, the African moral formation curriculum is embedded in the ceremonial activities of the diverse tribes. In fact, each African culture has an oral curriculum that relies on myths, folktales, proverbs, songs, dances, vestments, rituals, symbols, taboos, legends, stories, speeches, and ceremonies to instil and reward constructive moral values ([26]: pp. 6-7).

On the contrary, Compassion International’s community development engagement curricula in Africa are coloured by Europeanised religious interests, complicated scientific symbols and formulas, and complex theories and terminology that lack equivalent translations in African languages. Additionally, English syllable arrangements are not nearly as close to African word-syllable constructions. Astonishingly, within the programme’s activity outputs, Africanism is not evident in the staged intellectual development curricula or in the physical environment and iconic religious expressions. Instead, Christian communities work hard to convert others to their religious aspirations. Such anomalies tend to fuel interreligious discrimination in Africa to the disadvantage of alleviating economic poverty.

In the physical arena, Africans are Muslims and Christians to attain public goods, but in their innate ancestry, their divine, ingrained identities vibrate, and these magnetic forces draw them together as a people of Black culture to engage in traditional social transactions. In Africa, there are several tribes with diverse cultural expressions, but none of them has crafted conversion programmes to proselytise the tribal neighbours.

In reality, no African tribal icons coerce other tribes to convert to their cherished cultures nor to proselytise. Certainly, tribal hostilities, clashes, and vocational discrimination based on cultural differences hold less weight in Africa. People are aware of the intertribal colourful traditions and accord the utmost respect to each tribe’s cultural expression.

The greatest challenge is that Christianity and secularism have no genetic ancestry in Africa. They are not part of an African milk-suckled culture, and for that reason, their integration into African cultural expressions, social traditions, and language concepts is lacking. It is such an anomaly that has caused confusion in knowledge absorption, vocational innovations, misunderstandings, and a reduced impact of Compassion International programmes in alleviating economic poverty in Africa.

In Africa, Compassion International has existed for more than 70 years ([8]: p. iv). Even if the organisation is not the only player in the field of poverty alleviation in Africa, its existence over time would have ushered in reduced levels of economic poverty. In addition, the organisation would have projected the timelines for phasing its sponsorship programme activities in Africa.

On the contrary, World Bank estimates indicate that, globally, 23 million people were experiencing extreme poverty by the end of 2022. Many people living in poverty were found in sub-Saharan Africa ([18]: p. 11). The Afrobarometer study across 39 African countries revealed alarming trends in the number of people living in severe poverty, as indicated in Table 1.

Table 1. Poverty trends in Africa.

Source: [18]: p. 4.

Despite interventions by African governments, non-governmental organisations, and Faith-Based Organisations in the fight against economic poverty, statistics displayed in Table 1 reveal increasing levels of human suffering. In 2021/ 2023, 81% of Africans had inadequate cash incomes, 64% lacked access to quality medical care, 57% struggled to secure stable meals in their households, 55% could not access clean water, and 49% lacked access to cooking fuel ([18]: pp. 1-4).

In addition to the poverty trends shown in Table 1, Afrobarometer documented the levels of lived poverty across 39 African countries, as shown in Table 2. The average across the 39 African countries showed that 29% were experiencing low lived poverty, 36% moderate lived poverty, and 26% high lived poverty. Overall, 91% of Africans were battling multidimensional poverty ([18]: pp. 9-10).

Table 2. Levels of lived poverty in Africa |39 countries| 2021/2023.

Source: [18]: p. 9.

On the other hand, the study conducted by Afrobarometer revealed minimal numbers of the population (9% - 10%) in Africa that had reasonable access to cash income, quality medical care, stable food baskets, clean water, and cooking fuel ([18]: pp. 9-10).

Among the Africans with full access to material security, sustainable survival was associated with gender, settlement, education level, age, and employment, as illustrated in Table 3. Women (10%) and men (11%) were found to be at nearly the same levels of life survival and material provisions. While it is unclear how the lucky few Africans earned their stable incomes, 15% lived in urban centres, compared with 6% in rural areas.

Table 3. Full access to basic necessities.

Source: [18]: p. 10.

As illustrated in Table 3, the Afrobarometer study further found that among the economically stable Africans, 21% had post-secondary education, 10% had secondary education, 7% had primary education, and 4% had no formal education. Having a stable income without professional skills is quite a challenge, unless individuals inherit resources from their parents or are geniuses whose backgrounds did not provide them with opportunities to develop professional skills. Nonetheless, in every society, there are talented people with less education who have mastered the art of leveraging educated professionals to build their economic empires.

Results in Table 3 go on to show that among the Africans with stable household economic resources, 9% were found to be aged 18 - 35 years, 10% were aged 36 - 45 years, 11% were aged 46 - 55 years, and 14% were aged 56 years or above. This means that older people were more economically stable than the younger generation, but the percentage differences are minimal, and this does not provide a framework for determining which age group can be relied upon to mentor economically struggling Africans.

Finally, the results revealed that among economically stable Africans, 18% were full-time professional employees, 10% were part-time professional employees, 8% were unemployed and not looking for work, and 5% were looking for professional employment. In Africa, it is clear that few people are economically stable, even though several government-, civic-, and religion-driven initiatives are in place to empower the struggling poor to attain economic independence. This means that the poverty-alleviation methods need to be reconstructed.

Compassion International is documented to have started the child sponsorship programme in Uganda in the 1980s. Since then, 86,292 young people have graduated from the programme, and 142,135 children and youth are currently active, each attached to a caring sponsor from overseas countries. In 2024, 26,130 foetuses were enrolled in the programme, monitored, and pregnant mothers were supported to access quality antenatal care. To keep the programme running, children are enrolled from ages 0 to 9, and they graduate from the programme when aged between 12 and 22 ([1]).

The records published in 2025 reveal that 150,370 children were registered, that the organisation partnered with 498 Christian congregations, and that 2460 breastfeeding mothers were supported ([5]).

To fulfil its holistic mission, Compassion International’s head office in Uganda works in partnership with 485 local evangelical churches and is active in 123 of Uganda’s 135 districts. The programme implementers on the ground include professional staff and volunteers, supervised by local church leadership and the Compassion International national technical team. The national technical team approves and monitors the programme curriculum, which focuses on nurturing young people to develop a Christian faith, build social capital, manage their physical health, and acquire vocational skills ([1]).

In their strategic endeavours, Compassion International-Uganda occasionally phases out “underperforming field child programs.” The move is aimed at minimising financial abuse and resource wastage in some places, while in other places, where their efforts are measured to have reduced poverty levels, the partnership is terminated and resources are allocated to other disadvantaged communities ([15]). However, the puzzle to ponder is why terminate the sponsorship programme, yet the poor will never cease to be in every earthly locality (Deuteronomy 15:11; Mathew 26:11)?

Of course, terminating the sponsorship programme in places where local leadership is involved in fraudulent practices is necessary; however, such a retributive stance needs to be pursued with patience. African conflict resolution relies heavily on ritualistic restorative approaches rather than punitive ones. Seeds planted over time in a given community take root and become deeply rooted in the innocent people’s lives; the wound inflicted when such deep-rooted relationships are terminated harms a network of communal relationships.

Certainly, the relationship-termination approaches at hand indicate that the framers of the Compassion International programme deliveries did not deliberately take steps to build African ritualistic community ownership supervision, craft local resource mobilisation and sustainable measures, and public display programme continuity exit indicators.

True, leadership challenges arise in every organisation, but terminating programmes on the grounds of mismanagement or having reached the exit period, other than due to an irreversible natural disaster, is not what missiologists Henry Venn, Rufus Anderson, Paul Hiebert, and David Bosch put forward as the best stewardship approach to build a self-propagating, self-governing, self-supporting, and self-theologizing, indigenous Christian community ([30]: p. 170; [21]).

To affirm the complex implementation challenges at Compassion International, a visit to the Bugiri, Namayingo, Mayuge, and Busia districts, where the children and youth sponsorship programmes have existed since the 1980s, revealed the information shown in Table 4.

Table 4. Compassion international-supported field centres.

Of the 36 sites visited and the ongoing religious activities observed, 21 field centres were still active and receiving technical and financial support from Compassion International. To the 15 centres that had been terminated, while many vulnerable children had been supported, there was no observable continuity of local church community-driven sponsorship programmes. To make matters worse, the church-nurturing environments had nothing visible to show they were nurturing children in the community holistically, and, in the worst cases, some former Christian congregations’ child nurture programmes had gone extinct.

The deteriorating church’s nurturing environments, poor school infrastructures, poor community hygiene and sanitation, and poor housing observed on the ground were indicative that child sponsorship programmes were forced onto vulnerable people, or that the relational management supervisory approaches were foreign. On the other hand, probably because the programme promoters knew it all, people folded their hands and adopted a lethargic attitude and a dependent mentality.

Development relationships are two-way benefits. The parties endorse policy-convinced terms for engagement at the individual and communal levels. The question to ponder, then, is: why admit the poor into a sponsorship programme without indoctrinating them from the get-go about what they are supposed to pay back to the organisation that intends to lift them out of economic poverty? Of course, not all able-bodied poor people can make it in life at the same pace, but the small number who learn quickly and successfully graduate each year can be resourceful in helping the many who are struggling to rethink their actions and work toward attaining vocational skills.

Hearteningly, the physical and social environments visited in Bugiri, Namayingo, Mayuge, and Busia districts in Uganda (Table 4) revealed that even when Compassion International was investing high sums of money to better the lives of the programme recipients, there persist poor school infrastructures, terrible community sanitation and hygiene, community environment degradation, and less involvement of the public in providing school going children with lunch meals. Several beneficiaries who exited the sponsorship programme without attaining vocational skills were living in economic poverty, while a few had made it in life.

Surprisingly, the family setups of those who had made it in life were admirable. Negligible numbers were providing financial support for the infrastructure development of their local churches and schools, and driven by the African collective responsive consciousness, they were paying university tuition fees for their relatives and neighbours. However, such a drive was not within Compassion International’s policy framework for inspiring alumni to give back to their communities and the organisation to continue nurturing the localised expanding webs.

It is clear-cut that Compassion International is active in 123 of Uganda’s 135 districts ([1]), and for that reason, economic poverty would not be an issue to grapple with. While Compassion International is geared at alleviating economic poverty, the trends observed in the districts of Bugiri, Namayingo, Mayuge, Busia and the national poverty levels cannot by themselves establish that the programmes caused, failed to reduce, or increased poverty. Poverty in the Ugandan context is influenced by multiple factors that the organization is struggling to address.

In examining poverty among the 23,181,629 Ugandans aged 10 years or above, the 2024 housing census found that 20.2% had never attended school, 39.4% were primary school dropouts, and 5.7% had attained post-secondary education. The census also found that 17.4% of males and 22.7% of females could not read or write. In the Karamoja sub-region, the literacy rate was at 25.4%, the lowest countrywide ([32]: pp. xxi, 42-43).

In addition, [34] reported that even with free universal education and additional support from development partners, the number of out-of-school children was increasing, as shown in Table 5.

Table 5. 2014 to 2017 out-of-school children aged 6 to 18 years.

Source: [34]: p. 13.

Table 5 is illustrative that even when there exists free universal education promoted by the government of Uganda, interventions by Faith-Based Organisations, and support extended by several tributary development stakeholders in support of young people to attain meaning in life, study results show that multitudes of young people either dropout of schools or do not value education or there are life survival inadequacies that are affecting children’s participation in formal education.

On the other hand, the low number of young people accessing post-primary and non-formal education indicates multiple roadblocks that hinder Ugandans from acquiring professional skills. This finding accurately reflects the on-the-ground reality in places where Compassion International has invested resources for decades.

Region-wise, the average numbers experiencing multidimensional poverty across aspects established by the [33], that is, educational deprivation, inability to access quality medical care and basic social services, and poor household living standards, are indicated in Table 6.

Table 6. Multidimensional poverty in Uganda.

Source: [33]: p. 33.

Of Uganda’s total population of 45,905,417 (Uganda Bureau of Statistics, 2024: p. 13), 44,138,557 people, as shown in Table 6, experience multidimensional poverty. Besides the adult population, there exist millions of children in Uganda affected by poverty. Of the 22.9 million Ugandan children, over 4.2 million are living in extreme poverty ([29]).

Given the poverty alleviation programmes supported by the Government and development partners such as Compassion International, it would be reasonable to conclude that the visualised inputs of the development groups are yielding sustainable results in alleviating economic poverty in Uganda, but the contrary is what is noticeable on the ground. This means that the poverty-alleviation empowerment methodologies rolled out by the government and development partners are not well-engineered to guide indigenous people towards self-discovery.

Even when life-robbing challenges that affect humanity on the surface are universal, solutions born in a particular cultural setting may yield little impact in another. Every earthly locality is unique, and beneath its mental shadows lie hidden treasures that, if the beholder of the culture is not unleashed towards self-discovery, can lead to a waste of invested resources in the process of alleviating economic poverty.

Just as human beings differ in their biometric makeup, so each community is unique, and once that convictional uniqueness is discovered, then society can emerge from economic poverty at its own divine-driven pace. As such, it is important to spend quality time piloting development programmes in a particular setting. It is on the basis of newly discovered knowledge that aligns with indigenous aspirations that the community can be unleashed towards self-discovery and local resource mobilisation.

To raise local resources, a programme is in the pipeline, crafted by the Compassion International Uganda office, to reach out to alumni who benefited from sponsorship support, inviting them to contribute financially to support the needy in the country ([15]). While the initiative sounds worthwhile, it is doubtful whether its massive rollout will yield results. European nationals are driven by their moral convictions and statutory frameworks to contribute resources to support charitable activities. A foreign cut-and-paste resource mobilisation strategy that is not immersed in African collective responsiveness is most likely to yield negligible results and waste financial resources in executing the ambitious Alumni Fund Project. Besides, a good initiative that is not tied to government policy frameworks and African conventional values that inspire voluntary giving, public accountability, and two-way benefits for givers and receivers is less likely to survive.