OrphanAid Africa is a non-profit, non-governmental organization.  OrphanAid Africa’s aim is to support orphans and vulnerable children in Ghana through programs in care reform, education, and development.  Our goal is to ensure that children grow up in safe and permanent family settings with appropriate care and protection.

Our Aims:
1. To prevent the premature separation of children from their family by enhancing the capacity of ill and impoverished parents and strengthening the community.
    - Sponsored education program
    - Health and Wellness centers
    - HIV prevention programs
    - Nutritional support

2. To develop a Model Children’s Home and Community Project as a model for institutional care and community help for West Africa.
    
3. To assist the government & civil society in policy, planning and delivery systems to OVCs by collaborating and strengthening the Department of Social Welfare in Ghana (DSW).
    - assist the DSW in writing legislation and creating minimum standards program for Children's Homes.

4. To ensure the proper care for OVC.
    - acting as a model and helping meet minimum standards in Children's Homes and community day care centers.

OrphanAid Africa was founded by Lisa Lovatt-Smith in October 2002. Lisa is an established author whose published work includes 13 books on design and photography. She was an editor at Vogue magazine for many years while living in both Spain and France. In 2002 Lisa decided to volunteer with her daughter at an orphanage in Ghana. There were more than 100 destitute and abandoned children living at the orphanage, some brought to the home by police or social welfare workers because the children’s parents had died of endemic sicknesses such as malaria, AIDS, or tuberculosis. Very often, however, the children were abandoned because the parents simply couldn’t afford to take care of them.

This experience proved to be so life changing for Lisa that she left behind her glamorous lifestyle in Europe and moved to Ghana full-time. Her desire to help the orphans was a long-lasting and substantial one, driving her to launch OrphanAid Africa with the aim of helping make sure no child should need to grow up in an institution, unloved and with few prospects for the future.  

Initially OA developed projects to help make children’s homes self-sufficient by individually analyzing their acute problems. We designed programs that focus on education, healthcare, basic infrastructure and farming.  Over time however,

OA has drastically extended its approach to encompass the greater community by implementing community outreach programs such as Well Women’s Centers, a HIV prevention radio prorgram, a therapeutic feeding center, sponsoring extreme medical cases or funding education for 400 children in the community. We believe that by helping families and strengthening the community, we ensure that they can care and provide for their children so that there will be less abandoned or orphaned children in the future.  

In addition, we also run our own Children’s Home and community, specializing in temporary care for babies and children with acute health problems, HIV/AIDS, or young adults rejected by other children’s homes. Here OA encourages adoption and fostering, under the guidelines of Social Welfare, of orphaned and vulnerable children by loving parents.  

In 2006 OA adopted a new policy, inline with the guidelines of UNICEF, the UN and the Government of Ghana, to avoid institutional care for orphaned and vulnerable children whenever possible.   Under the motto “Every child deserves a family” our emphasis is on community and family care and on the reinforcement of civil society in order to encourage the preservation of family ties.     

Today OA’s projects directly reach over 2000 needy children and women each month in Ghana and in November of this year, UNICEF named OrphanAid Africa one of only four official partners in Ghana!