History
The Trust founded in November 2004 was created in response to the plight of children at risk. South Africa like the rest of sub-Saharan Africa is at present is in the full brunt of an HIV and AIDS epidemic. South Africa, with 1 in 9 of our adult population HIV positive, and with 5,6 million people living with HIV out of a total population of 47 million, makes us a country with serious problem. A consequence of which is that we have 1,5 million maternal orphans, of which only about 1600 were adopted and 400 000 placed in foster care in 2007/8. As a result, the Trust located at the Innovation Hub in Pretoria is committed to a social innovation project in which we are creating a platform that includes business information management systems and business intelligence tools, in order to scale present levels of care.
Our intention is to work towards enabling existing care-based organizations to double and redouble present levels of care from 15% to a target of 60%. In order to do this we are advocating a “Virtual Adoption” model in which the global village is mobilized to share responsibility with the local village in responding to the care of children at risk. In this regard the African idiom that it takes a village to grow a child is given new intent. “Virtual adoption” is based on virtual cyber teams/clusters being matched through community-based organizations with vulnerable child care units/families. The virtual teams following a menu driven set of options, sponsor specific services and needs in a designated and secure manner. The objective is for there to be no direct contact allowed between the sponsors and the children. The narratives and regular reporting on the progress of the children are posted on an electronic one way window allowing for sufficient emotional information without compromising the safety and identity of the children. We believe this to be a sustainable model for the future. While the South African Diaspora as well as the anti-apartheid networks offers valuable sources of international recruitment, South Africans themselves within the country need to be recruited. The Trust believes that traditional CSI needs to migrate to a social capital model in which employees, customers, clients and shareholders are mobilized.
In order to manage this innovative concept the Trust has built what is referred to as MSOVC - a management system for orphans and vulnerable children. The IT platform consists of SAP Business One an Enterprise Resource Planning system; PTC Windchill a Product Life Cycle Management system; James Remote Terminal consisting at present of a Sagem Morph 2, a biometric scanner capability; Talent Management Software from Success Factors; the Monitoring and Evaluation system is still at present being selected. To date MSOVC 1.0 has been implemented at one of our pilot community-based partners who have migrated from a traditional financial management system to SAP Business One and from Microsoft Excel to PTC Windchill. MSOVC 2.0 will consists of an integration of the software within the James platform and should be completed during 2011. MSOVC 3.0 which should commence in 2012 will result in an automated system that allows for the full scalability and roll-out of the James Vision.
What this means is that we have within our grasp major social innovation in which children at risk can be reached on a large scale. The care of children within family based care units and the use of a child status index to determine vulnerability as well as the implementation of holistic child development within a child care plan and care cycle is a major contribution to internationally accepted good practice.