Emergency Appeal launched

SOS Children launches formal emergency appeal

SOS Children invites people to sign up as emergency relief sponsors, contributing £20/month for six months to emergency relief and rebuilding lifes in Kashmir. Sponsors will be free to cancel at any time and at the end of six months would be offered a child sponsorship whereever the need is greatest in the world at that time. SOS Children are already receiving requests from people seeing children alone on the news about the possibility of sponsoring earthquake orphans long term. Child sponsorship is a very good way of helping children with nothing. At present nothing is clear in terms of numbers of orphaned children and so on but we are not presently anticipating offering children in Kashmir for sponsorship. Afterwards, supporting a child elsewhere where Famine and AIDS are also leaving little children with no one would be a good way to carry on your support.

There are several reasons why we doubt there will be long term sponsorships for "quake orphans":

First, the timing of the earthquake (after schools have started) means it is likely many more children than adults will have died in some places. Pakistan is a well organised country and it is likely that children will end up being placed with relatives helped by the state.

Second, although SOS Children helps thousands of children in Pakistan (including eight children's villages, several schools and other projects) there is a very strong base of local supporters who raise enough funds to pay for all the children there (except for a few sponsorships set up a long time back). We anticipate after the rest of the world has helped with the rebuild costs and emergency relief that the local communities will support their own orphaned and abandoned children (as for the last 15 years) without needing help from abroad. Indeed we anticipate that the Pakistani people around the world will resume being among the more generous in their support of orphans everywhere.