What has CORAfrica achieved in twenty years, and where is it going?
We have built four primary and four secondary schools, educated 7,330 children, reached 64 communities, and empowered 805 families and business owners, 513 of them women. 613 staff have been carried on our payroll over those twenty years, and each institution is transferred, in time, to the partners we collaborate with. Founded by a Catholic priest in 2006, CORAfrica has worked in Nigeria and out of the United States ever since, on the conviction that we live in one interdependent world and are here to share the story with anyone willing to collaborate. What comes next is scale: building on that foundation to replicate the Community Education Centre model in new localities, and to open more partnerships.
Where do the children live, and who benefits from a donation?
In their own families, in their own villages. The extended family system in Africa means children live with their families and return to them, so our purpose is to help the family become sustainable rather than to replace it. Those families face the familiar economic challenges — poor access to quality education, poor healthcare, poor nutrition — and donations let us put support systems around the children, mostly inside the school system.
What is the most important need right now?
Our new Community Education Centre in Nasarawa State, near Abuja, to show the model outside Cross River State; a skills acquisition centre inside it; and the encouragement of young people to build practical skills for self-reliance while they are still at school.
What is the Community Education Centre model?
It combines education and healthcare inside one school system, with agriculture and economic empowerment added as programmes around them. Vocational and Skills Acquisition Centres inside the schools let a child leave with a skill that will sustain a livelihood for the future.
Which projects have made the most difference?
Three. The school system, where vocational training turns directly into employment and income. The Economic Empowerment Programme, which helps families and individuals start businesses and become independent. And the healthcare programme, above all the clinic, which puts medical help in front of a child during the school day.
What does the Catholic faith have to do with it?
CORAfrica is built on the Social Justice agenda of the Church: the dignity of the human person, so that each child is treated as an end and never only as a means; solidarity, because the interdependence of peoples means the human family is one; the common good, which obliges us to grow more sensitive to children who suffer deprivation; and self-reliance, so that communities design themselves to make young people independent.
Can our family be matched with a family in Nigeria?
It is possible, and we would like to do more of it. Child sponsorship works best when children are matched with their peers between institutions, and a family-to-family partnership can let families share experiences and build genuine friendships. The point of the exchange is not only the money: it is friendship, solidarity and understanding between two very different places. Write to us if this interests you.
How large is an economic empowerment loan?
A beneficiary receives between ₦500,000 and ₦3,000,000, depending on the funds available. One used ₦3,000,000 to furnish and improve a gym business; another took ₦500,000, started a point-of-sale business, and later expanded it into the sale of phone accessories.
How are those loans decided, and are they repaid?
Beneficiaries are sought through the Catholic parishes before any money is released, and are trained in good repayment practice before they receive it. Repayment has run at about 80% so far, with minimal losses. The difficulties are the ones you would expect: the depth of a family’s need, the viability of the business proposed, and the applicant’s own commitment to managing the support productively.
How much does a school clinic actually do?
The Sr. Augustina Abuo Memorial Medical Clinic alone has attended to close to 500 students and more than 1,000 community members. Care is free to the children who study there and affordable to everybody else, and the clinics run medical outreach into rural communities, refugee settlements, schools and orphanages that have no clinic of their own.
How can a major donor leave something lasting?
By funding something that stands: a school, a medical centre, a skills acquisition centre, a demonstration farm, a clinic, an economic empowerment fund. Our operational model connects a donor to a specific project, coordinates the building of it and monitors what it does afterwards. The invitation is not to give to a project but to join a legacy — one child, one family and one community at a time.
