A.F.C.E  Field Activities.

As an organisation that strives to make an impact in the lives of people and their children living in various deprived communities, we try our best to ensure that we go down to these communities as often as possible and get well-informed data from the community members themselves. The reason for doing this is that we want to ensure that we give exactly what is needed by these people and do not just make decisions based on our assumptions.

 Going down to these communities, enables us to connect with these people and develop a good relationship with them which we believe is quite vital in ensuring that we carry out things in the right way as well. In addition to this, we believe that going down to these communities and sitting with the children and their guardians, gives us the opportunity to ask important questions and get reliable answers to these questions. The reliability of the data collected in turn comes in very handy to us when we select children for our sponsorship scheme. It also serves as a guide when it comes to making decisive decisions.

In order to ensure that the field officers sent by the organisation carry out things in the right way when they go out to these communities, we do organise workshop training sessions for them during which they do learn all the essentials skills needed for them to exhibit, like; being very attentive to every single thing around them, being very patient and be a good listener during their discussions with the people, to always take notes of every essential information that is being brought to their notice, etc and many more. Followed by this, we also conduct training sessions for all other staff members as well to ensure that they are well-guided as to how they need to conduct themselves both in and out of the working environment.

Therefore, in summary, our organisation ensures that in any set task its staff are engaged in they do so in the right way. We also ensure that all staff members of ours realise the fact every day is a learning process for them, and they should at all times make themselves approachable especially when they set out to meet the people living in these communities.

Selection of Beneficiaries.

This process is very crucial and is always exceedingly difficult because every single child we meet deserves the opportunity to be helped. Therefore, in order for us to as least do our selection process in the right way that eliminates every element of bias, there are certain set rules and procedures that we do follow during this process.

Firstly, we make sure that for any guardian that wants his//her child to benefit from our scholarship, there is a form that they will first have to fill out. In this form, they will provide all the necessary background information about the child. In addition to this, we as an organisation also carryout out our own background checks to ensure that the information being given to us by a guardian correlates with what we as an institution have gathered from our private investigation. In cases where probably a child does not in any way have a legal guardian, we do have special regulations in place to ensure that such a child will not by any means be left out.

Upon passing through this first phase, we then invite the child over to our office space for an interview, and if the child has a legal guardian then we invite him/her as well. During the interview session, there are certain things we ask and look out for all of which will be left confidential to us. The response/feedback we get from the legal guardian and most especially the child is what at the end of this process we do in turn use to award a child our scholarship. Even though our method might not be the best because there is hardly ever the best method in this process due to it difficulty, we do try our best to ensure that we choose amongst those that applied the ones that need the help the most and whose stories do mostly add up. Subsequently, we also have other ways through which a child can also be selected even without specifically applying for the scholarship. However, such a child will as well have to fill out our form and be interviewed in order for us to make sure that it is fair for everyone. At the moment, we have been sponsoring three children since the start of our scholarship scheme in 2018 and this is because of the limited funds we have at our disposal. However, we are optimistic that we the help of people we will be able to offer scholarship to more children out there because there is truly a lot of them who need it. Till then, we will continue to work hard as an organisation and try our best to see that we extend this scholarship to more deprived children in our society.