Fikelela was founded by an Anglican vicar in 2001 and is run by local South African women. Situated in the middle of Khayelitsha is a huge slum with hundreds of thousands of people living in extreme poverty, reaching almost from the Cape Town airport to the beach.
With the motto ‘Every child is my child’, Fikelela takes in abandoned and orphaned children, and nurses them back to health. In the case of HIV positive children, they are placed on antiretrovirals. Once they are healthy, they are placed back into the community with trained, supported foster mothers.
Fikelela cares for up to 30 children under the age of eight in the children's home and supports 48 children in foster care within the community.
Foster Care Families are provided with food, medicines and education costs for the children placed. Single mothers are given micro-finance support to help them be self-sufficient. The project partners with the government to provide antiretrovirals where appropriate as some of the babies have HIV.
The team would like to buy the piece of land next door (£6,000) and build a new facility (£30,000) to care for more children, provide a health clinic and expand the project to be able to take in another 100 babies each year.
