One boy. 30,000 people with clean water. Here's how they're connected.

Edward’s local borehole still works. In Kapululwe, a rural area of Zambia, it’s a symbol of change that lasts. Across the community, 237 boreholes and 23 mechanized water systems now bring clean, safe water to more than 30,000 people.

Edward teaches school there now. In 2003, he was a boy who had just been sponsored.

Those two facts are connected, and Edward’s story shows how.

A family far away

Edward was born in 1992 and grew up in Kapululwe. His sponsors were Mike and Mary and their family in California. They helped pay for his education, but what stayed with him most was their encouragement. Year after year, they made it clear that they believed in him.

He did very well at school. When he graduated in 2011, he shared his results with his sponsors, and they told him they thought he should become a teacher. That vote of confidence stuck. Two years later he enrolled in a teaching diploma, with his parents and his sponsors both helping him through it.

During his student-teaching placement, he says, it clicked for him. In his words, “I’m a teacher. This is a job called by God.”

He qualified and now teaches at the local school. He says he loves teaching young children because they are the future leaders.

Home

Edward married his best friend from high school once she had finished her own studies. They have two children. On the day our team visited, his four-year-old daughter was sitting on his lap, proudly looking at photos of his sponsor family. They changed her father’s life, and by extension, hers.

Why it was never just about Edward

Child sponsorship at World Vision is designed to go beyond helping one individual child. A sponsor’s monthly gift is pooled with gifts from other sponsors. Together, their funds support development programs that serve the sponsored children, along with the whole community around them, tackling the root causes of poverty. Our research shows that for every child sponsored, four more in the community benefit.

So while Edward’s sponsors were encouraging one boy, their giving was also part of something much bigger in Kapululwe. With support from many sponsors:

• The community gained 237 boreholes and 23 water systems.
• More than 85 per cent of children gained access to a quality education through new school infrastructure and support.
• Sanitation facilities were built at schools, protecting the dignity and well-being of students, especially girls.
• A maternity clinic opened, housing was built for health workers, 155 savings groups formed and volunteers were trained.

All of this happened through the community’s hard work and partnership with World Vision.

After the program ended

World Vision doesn’t plan to stay in a community forever. Once a community has reached self-sustainable development, it “graduates,” and Kapululwe has. You can see what that looks like at Edward’s borehole. Local water committees were formed to keep the water points running, and his is still in good working order.

Edward says other sponsored children from his generation are now working as teachers and in skilled trades. He has a plan of his own, too. Within the next five years, he dreams of opening his own school so more children in Kapululwe can get an education.

A “thank you,” passed along

Edward’s first thank-you was personal. When we asked what he would want to tell his sponsors, he thanked them for what they’d done in his life. Then he thanked them on behalf of other people, too. Their sponsorship, he said, let him give back to his country, his community and his friends, and those people are grateful as well. “You have done a great job,” he said.

For donors whose giving grows out of their faith, Edward’s story is a picture of what stewardship can look like over more than twenty years. A gift was given quietly every month, and a community took that support and kept building.

Don’t call it charity. Call it change.

Charity meets a moment. Change lasts forever.

You can see the difference in Kapululwe. Local water committees keep the water running, and the boy who was sponsored in 2003 is now teaching the next generation.

This Giving Season, you could be where a story like Edward’s begins. When you sponsor a child, it isn’t charity. It’s change that reaches that child, their family and their entire community, and keeps going.