About
Special Hope Network is a faith-based organization that was created in order to address serious inequities and insufficiencies in the care for children at risk and orphans with special needs, specifically intellectual disabilities. Special Hope Network sees its primary role as creating partnerships with NGOs (non-Governmental organizations), CBOs (community-based organizations) and FBOs (faith-based organizations) that have been working within the populations of Southern Africa. Our aim is to encourage, support, and train the existing programs, and help to equip them to address the needs of children within their community. A Test
Why orphans with intellectual disabilities?
*Current reports from the World Health Organization estimate at present there are 15 million children world-wide who have been orphaned by AIDS, 12 million of whom reside in Sub-Saharan Africa. Those 12 million children represent only half of the total orphan population within the region. Nearly all experts agree that the number of orphans will continue to grow significantly over the next five to ten years, in some regions, dramatically.
*The World Health Organization, further estimates that 2 out of every 10 children in the developing world are disabled either physically, intellectually or both. Remarkable in its absence or perhaps, its exclusion there has been a lack of any focused attention on the plight of the neediest of orphans, those who have special needs, who are regularly rejected from receiving basic health care and even from admission to orphanages and foster care programs. The vast majority of children who have special needs world-wide are not registered at birth, and have no official or legal status, in the simplest of terms, they are not counted, therefore, they don’t count.
However, in the one research project by Yale professor Nora Groce, that focused on the relation of HIV/AIDS and people with disabilities, found that children with special needs were three times more likely to contract the AIDS virus than a typical child, in part that they are three times more likely to be raped, however they are extremely unlikely to receive medical treatment and therefore considerably more likely to die of HIV/AIDS than a typical child.
So, that is where Special Hope comes in. We believe we are part of a new move of God’s Spirit among His people in order to reach and love a people uniquely created to bear the image of God and to display God’s works.
