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‘Sponsor a child’ finally exposed as racist with ActionAid now backing grassroots projects instead

Charity

The Guardian has reported that ActionAid Co-leaders Taahra Ghazi and Hannah Bond are committed to ‘decolonise’ the charity’s work. The move comes as the new leadership team effectively abolished the outdated practice of sponsoring a child, insisting it reflects racialised and paternalistic attitudes.

Furthermore, they state their ultimate desire to shift narratives away from sympathy towards actual solidarity. This will be achieved by directly supporting grassroots projects instead of advertising individual children in what has been described as ‘poverty porn’.

However, this move exposes the quiet reality behind donations to ‘charity’. It’s always been less about helping people and more about letting the wealthy feel virtuous while cherry-picking who receives aid. Oh, and the richest are financially rewarded in the process with lucrative tax breaks. The world’s billionaires deepen inequality and deprivation, yet somehow still get to wear the halo of “philanthropist” — the ultimate irony.

Genuine commitment, not lip service

ActionAid was founded in 1972 and focused on finding sponsors for children in India and Kenya. Currently, the charity’s supporters sponsor children in 30 countries, accounting for 34% of their global funds. The move to targeting support directly to grassroots projects will start by working directly with groups across Africa, Latin America and Asia. This ensures funding decisions are guided by a community’s actual needs, making sure that donated funds are used for effective support.

Ghazi is quoted by The Guardian, stating:

Most of our supporters are relatively well-off people and many of them are white, so if you’re asking them to choose a picture of a brown or black child and choose the country they come from – effectively, that’s a very transactional relationship and quite a paternalistic one. We recognise that the current child sponsorship model reflects a different time.

We’re in the process, until 2028, of transformation that includes our systems, what money we give, how we procure services – we’re decolonising it. We are evolving the model so it is shaped by community voices and responds to the realities they face today.

We value our sponsors and remain committed to making sure their support continues to have a real impact. Meaningful change takes time, and this work is rooted in genuine commitment rather than lip service.

Decolonise western attitudes

However, calls to decolonise have long been made and charities have been very slow to take heed. A welcome change, but as The Guardian stated four years ago, a lot more needs to be done to address the attitudes at play:

For years, we didn’t talk about the white gaze, myself included … Child sponsorship is a small part of decolonising aid, but it’s a part NGOs need to change. It is a relic of the past.

Many agencies have moved away from sponsors of individual children to sponsors of communities, but they are still using individual children to ‘sell’ to donors,

Donors stick a picture of a child on their fridge and think of them as ‘our child’. They are well intentioned, but the parents of that child can’t refuse the money because they are living in poverty.

ActionAid’s shake-up exposes a harsh truth. Many charities have long served the interests of wealthy donors rather than their beneficiaries, perpetuating a colonialist mindset embedded in Western philanthropy.

The real goal should be giving families the tools to sustain themselves. Giving communities autonomous decision-making abilities will help to strengthen societies and build needed infrastructure. People don’t need rich people’s patronizing “handouts”, they need a responsible economy.

This post on X called out the richest for using slick language to look like the good guys, all while profiting massively from the very issues they claim to address:

Wealth taxes, not charity

This story exposes an undeniable truth: the world works in the interests of the wealthiest. They profit off real deprivation and plundered resources, then make measly “donations” back to the same countries. The irony is enough to make you sick. However, those tax breaks mean it’s just the richest rewarding themselves with a pat on the back.

Government’s must choose to implement fair taxation. This would force the richest to pay back into societies around the world, and work to dull the sharpest edge of an exploitative system. Instead of wealth disappearing into tax havens, that money could fund real social change. It would also ensure people in countries like Africa actually benefit from the wealth beneath their feet.

Let the richest earn their halos by actually paying their bloody taxes!

Featured image via ActionAid

By Maddison Wheeldon

This post was originally published on Canary.