SOS Children: SOS Schools Worldwide

SOS Children is the world’s largest orphan charity. We directly help over 70,000 children in our family-based SOS Children's Villages in 124 countries around the world. We give children who have nothing and no-one a family, a home, an education and a future.

SOS Children is also a very large School Charity. Sometimes we are called a “gutter-to-school” charity in contrast to “gutter-to-pavement” charities which only help children's immediate problems.

Although we do not offer Schools Linking (which tends to be too big a distraction to the already challenging task of running good schools in the developing world) we do have quite a lot of teaching resources for schools in the developed world, including the Our Africa project where children from across Africa present their own countries using flip videos. We also offer teaching aids (including lesson plans, curriculum maps and homework type assignments) based around our African projects on this website.

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SOS Schools

There are 205 SOS Schools: 118 in Africa, 26 in Latin America, 59 in Asia and the rest elsewhere. Furthermore, there are 228 SOS Nurseries and 64 SOS Training Centres. Learning at school helps poor children grow up with a much better chance of earning their own living. We run schools where there is no adequate local education. Generally the schools are about 30% children we care for in a nearby Children’s Village and 70% other local children living with their family in the community. Where we can find local middle class families who are able to pay school fees we try to include a similar number of them as well, especially since the outcome in terms of eventual jobs etc for the school children is enhanced by mixing with children from more successful backgrounds. We also have projects for vocational training to help young adults improve their own standard of living.

If you are interested in supporting an SOS School please see read more about SOS Children for details of how to help. Click on a continent below to find out more about SOS Children’s SOS Schools around the world.

Africa Americas Asia No schools in Australasia Europe
SOS Schools in:
Boy at SOS School Mthatha South Africa
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