CIOG providing financial assistance to over 500 children
General Manager of CIOG, Shameena Haniff
General Manager of CIOG, Shameena Haniff

…in its ‘Orphans and Vulnerable Children’ initiative

WITH its donors and supporters continuing to champion the cause of orphans and vulnerable children, the Central Islamic Organisation of Guyana (CIOG) is currently providing financial assistance to over 500 children as part of its Orphans and Vulnerable Children (OVC) initiative.

According to the organisation’s General Manager, Shameena Haniff, the initiative, which was launched in 1993, has seen a significant and continued growth in the number of children catered for yearly. She noted that the initiative was launched with just 13 children as beneficiaries.

The OVC programme assists children under the age of 16 with financial resources relating to their educational and social needs in an effort to ensure their future success and growth. Each child receives school uniforms, textbooks, medical examination, and financial help for extra lessons and exam fees, as well as a monthly stipend.

Haniff told this newspaper that although children no longer benefit from the programme when they reach the age of 16, the organisation, in most cases, continues to support some of them to ensure that they have access to resources that would enable them to benefit from a university education.

“The programme is up to when they finish writing CXC, so we see them up to CXC but even though there are some of them with potential or even those who don’t have the potential, we still try to work with them after they finished writing CXC. The whole idea of the programme is for them to be self-sufficient, so we take them up to that level and in a lot of cases we end up getting scholarships for them so they can end up going to university,” Haniff told this newspaper.

She also noted that CIOG works to ensure that those students who do not wish to go to a university are sent to other tertiary institutions to learn a trade so that they can earn.
Noting that each child benefits from varying resources and opportunities, Haniff explained that donations to the initiative are made by sponsors who cater either to one specific child or a group of children. She noted that this could allow for some students to have a greater push for academic opportunities such as private education.

“We have donors that contribute specifically to a set of children or we have sponsors that sponsor a particular child; we have sponsors that take care of each child, and it’s in most cases different for every individual case. We have certain sponsors who prefer the child be in an Islamic private school and would actually pay the school fees for them to attend either of the three CIOG schools,” Haniff explained.

The programme, according to Haniff, has had a major impact churning out adults in every profession, including teachers, lawyers, and doctors.
“Seeing how well children in the OVC programme have grown is pretty amazing because some children would have been in this programme as young as six months old and it would have carried them through until they are a good 17 or 18 years old. We get to help them in a way that was necessary for them to excel and understand that they can achieve whatever they want, it’s pretty amazing.”

According to the general manager, several children who benefited from the programme are now adults and have taken it upon themselves to “pay it forward” by sponsoring a child.
“They can now sponsor children that are now in that position that they were in, so it’s really great for us because we have seen them go through the entire programme and now, they can give back not just finances but also encouragement because they have been there, they know and they can relate to the children in the program,” the general manager noted.
So far, the programme has aided over 2,000 orphans and vulnerable children in finishing their nursery, primary and secondary education, since its inception.

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