DAVID ADAMS reports on the findings of ground-breaking research showing the positive effects of child sponsorship …
New independent research has shown that children sponsored through child development and advocacy organisation Compassion stay in school longer, are more likely to have salaried employment and are more likely to be leaders in their communities and churches than their peers.
The research, the results of which were published in the Journal of Political Economy last month, was carried out by Dr Bruce Wydick and a team of researchers from three US universities – San Francisco, Minnesota and Washington – over almost three years, from June, 2008, to August, 2010.
“(W)hen a very independent, high level research group that has nothing to do with Compassion rigorously tests that and comes up with fantastic results, that’s both humbling and exciting.”– Dr Alistair Sim, director of Compassion International’s program effectiveness research
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It involved almost 10,000 people across six nations – Bolivia, Guatemala, India, Kenya, the Philippines and Uganda, including 1,860 adults who were registered in Compassion’s child sponsorship program between 1980 and 1992. Others involved in the study included siblings of the adults who had been sponsored as children and people of the same age from both within and without the communities in which children had been sponsored.
Speaking to Sight, Dr Alistair Sim, director of Compassion International’s program effectiveness research, says one of the benefits of the research project was that it had been conducted independently of Compassion. “It was a completely independent, unsolicited body of research,” he says.
He adds the results were exciting for a number of reasons. “You ask anyone in Compassion – they’ll say ‘Well, we’ve known this for a number of years’. You meet your sponsored child, you meet various project staff and you mix with the children – you anecdotally see a difference. And so you can take lots of those anecdotes and you put them together and build a picture. Our own internal research has also given those indications. But when a very independent, high level research group that has nothing to do with Compassion rigorously tests that and comes up with fantastic results, that’s both humbling and exciting.”
Dr Sim says the results are exciting not just for Compassion but for the rest of the development community as well – particularly given that this was the first independent study of its kind. He says that while the published research looked at the effect of sponsorship on the length of time children stayed in school, the likelihood of salaried employment and leadership status, the study also touched on other areas – such as the ‘spill-over’ effect sponsored children have on their wider communities – which may be the subject of future research papers.
In the meantime, Dr Sim says the research will act as a spur for the organisation to continue “what we believe God has called us to do in the first place”.
“And that is individual child sponsorship. Wholistic child development through focusing on an individual child. Not everybody shares the view that is the best way to do development. Now, we can have discussions about that until the cows come home but it comes back to what we believe God has called us to do, and it’s nice to have, if you like, earthly or worldly validation – that what you believe God has called you to do…has been shown to be effective.”
~ www.compassion.com.au/content/wydick-research/gkiaug
