Our approach

In forg­ing a strate­gic part­ner­ship with each orphan­age we sup­port, we adopt a stepped approach to our pro­gramme of devel­op­ment aid.

There are three main cat­e­gories of aid which we can offer, and within each of these there are two “steps” to be taken, in ensur­ing that we build solid foun­da­tions to our support.  It is a crit­i­cal pre­req­ui­site of every project we under­take that our aid must ulti­mately be self-sustaining.  Our aim is to enable the chil­dren we sup­port to become more inde­pen­dent, and we must ensure that our aid pro­gramme doesn’t actu­ally increase their depen­dence on out­side assistance. 

The three cat­e­gories of aid, and the steps within each of them, are:

  • Tac­ti­cal aid or emer­gency relief
    • food & water
    • shel­ter & security
  • Inter­me­di­ate devel­op­ment aid
    • health & hygiene
    • basic lit­er­acy
  • Strate­gic devel­op­ment aid
    • higher edu­ca­tion
    • voca­tional training

The stepped approach adopted by The Man­dalay Projects, which we call “the build­ing blocks of hope”, is a defin­ing fea­ture of our work.  We believe that each block must be firmly in place, before sub­se­quent blocks can be added.  We see no point in engag­ing an orphan­age in dis­cus­sions about higher edu­ca­tion, if the chil­dren are dying of star­va­tion, or do not have access to a sus­tain­able sup­ply of uncon­t­a­m­i­nated water.  Equally, we will only embark on our stepped approach with a new part­ner orphan­age, if it is clear to us that we will be able to move rea­son­ably quickly towards the higher edu­ca­tion and voca­tional train­ing steps.  In judg­ing this, we will con­sider a num­ber of dif­fer­ent fac­tors, rang­ing from the basic logis­tics of pro­vid­ing sup­port, through to the qual­ity of man­age­ment at the orphanage.

Some of our part­ner orphan­ages already have the more basic build­ing blocks firmly in place, and in such cases we are able to move directly to the strate­gic edu­ca­tion and train­ing steps.  In other cases, we have iden­ti­fied orphan­ages which are prac­ti­cally des­ti­tute, but which show a keen desire to work towards the more strate­gic goals.

In the Projects tab, we describe the work we have under­taken to date, which includes exam­ples of each of the build­ing blocks, and illus­trates how the stepped approach works in practice.