Save the Children: Brief History
& summary of the COPE Program

Save the Children was founded on 19th. May 1919, by the British lady Eglantyne Jebb. It is now the World's largest independent movement for children, leading the fight to deliver immediate and lasting change in the lives of disadvantaged children.

Working in over 100 countries across the world and comprising 32 Country Members, the Organization is grouped together as a Global Alliance with common principles and themes.

Save the Children (USA) is working in 11 poor African nations, as well as elsewhere in the Middle East, Asia, Europe, the Newly Independent States, and Latin America.  The Agency is helping address the HIV/AIDS pandemic in Sub-Saharan Africa through HIV/AIDS awareness, prevention, and community mobilization programs. The flagship program serving the basic needs of AIDS orphans and AIDS-vulnerable families is the Community Based Options for Protection and Empowerment (COPE). This currently mobilizes local care and support activities benefiting some 20,000 AIDS orphans in Malawi.  Save the Children is now seeking the resources to expand this model in Malawi, and into other Africa nations.

Malawi Background

Malawi is one of the African nations hardest hit by the HIV/AIDS pandemic.  Nearly 16 percent of adults ages 15 to 49 – some 800,000 – are believed to be infected with HIV, and a child born today has a life expectancy of just 37 years. Some 275,000 children have been orphaned by AIDS and it is estimated that one in every four children will become AIDS orphans by the year 2010.  A World Bank study found that AIDS has wiped out most of the economic gains made by the country since its independence from Britain in 1964.

The crisis is dealing especially cruel blows to these AIDS orphans.  They lose the love and support of parents who die of an AIDS-related illness; they are frequently deprived of an education and economic and social security; they are isolated and discriminated against because of the stigma that HIV/AIDS carries; older children often become the sole caretakers of their brothers and sisters; and they are extremely vulnerable to exploitation and sexual violence, thereby increasing their own risk of becoming infected with HIV.

COPE Program

Community involvement and self-reliance are at the core of Save the Children's program, Community-based Options for Protection and Empowerment (

Working with coalitions of local government officials, business leaders and non-governmental organizations, COPE has helped thousands of families to take care of patients living with HIV/AIDS, to meet nutritional, emotional and educational needs of the children, and to improve their long-term financial security.

Community Based Options for Protection and Empowerment (COPE) is a five-year-old program, now helping address the basic needs of some 20,000 AIDS orphans in four districts in Malawi: Dedza, Lilongwe, Mangochi, and Nkhota-kota. 

Through COPE, Save the Children has created and are supporting some 200 Village AIDS Committees, which mobilize and conduct care and support activities such as food security, education, and psychosocial assistance for children who have been orphaned by the AIDS-related death of a parent and have been largely left to fend for themselves and care for siblings.  Committees also assist families that are caring for AIDS orphans and families that have lost incomes, taken children out of school, or are dangerously close to dissolving because of an adult’s AIDS illness.

COPE centers on the creation of Village AIDS Committees that:

• Train individuals for home-based care of chronically ill patients

• Offer Emotional and social support to orphans and their caregivers

• Ensure the continuation of children's education and recreation activities

• Provide community-based child care for families of AIDS orphans

• Supplement income through gardening and other small business activities

• Promote prevention and health safety through organized public events, structured youth clubs and other popular education methods

Advocacy & Policy

Save the Children is also participating in national-level advocacy and policy-making through COPE.  The Agency is a leading member of Malawi’s National Children and Violence Task Force, which conducted a study on child sexual abuse and is developing a national document on children and violence in Malawi.

The COPE program is one of the very few programs for AIDS orphans currently being taken to scale anywhere in Africa and has been used as a model by one of Save's Global colleagues, Family Health International, in Zambia.  It has been endorsed by the Government of Malawi, has been evaluated several times by an outside assessment team, and has been referred to by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) – one of its primary funders – as one of the premier HIV/AIDS programs in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Expanding COPE

Save the Children’s long-range HIV/AIDS strategy in Africa calls for COPE’s widespread replication and the application of its best practices for other community mobilization programs serving AIDS orphans.  The need for programs such as COPE are irrefutable: Africa’s current population of AIDS orphans is projected to grow to a staggering 44 million by the year 2010.

In Malawi, Save the Children seeks the resources to replicate COPE in the country’s northern region, where we are not presently working.  Save the Children partners with an NGO already conducting HIV/AIDS programs in the region to maximize the program’s reach by identifying and training local community groups (church groups, youth groups) in the COPE methodology and its implementation. 

The Agency has also begun exploring the potential of a “Living University” in Malawi that would train community leaders and HIV/AIDS workers in COPE’s best practices for community mobilization. This cost-effective strategy is based on Save the Children’s groundbreaking Living University model in Vietnam, which is training health workers and community leaders from across the country in our successful child nutrition program and identifying “positive deviance” practices of poor families whose children are better nourished than others.

Elsewhere in Africa, Save the Children has the opportunity to use the current HIV/AIDS awareness and prevention programs as a springboard for introducing COPE.  These programs include adolescent HIV/AIDS education and a negotiation skills project for girls in a heavily traveled transportation corridor in Mozambique’s Gaza Province, youth education in high schools in Ethiopia’s capitol of Addis Ababa, and psychosocial activities for some 1,000 orphans at two Ethiopian orphanages run by a colleague organization.

Visit Save the Children Global Alliance.
For more information on the African Programs, check out Save the Children (USA).
Visit the website of sister organization, Save the Children (UK).
And, see the yates family school program in Cambodia, with Save the Children (Norway).

Save the Children
Save the Children COPE stories
Malawi Journal
Malawi Journal part 2
Malawi Journal part 3
Malawi Journal part 4
Malawi Journal part 5
Malawi Journal part 6
Mozambique Journal
Mozambique Journal part 2
Mozambique Journal part 3
Reflections and articles
HIV / AIDS in Africa
Advisory Board Biographies
Advisory Board Visit Agenda
'net links to Malawi & Mozambique
Photo Albums

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 Last updated March 08, 2005

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