Spending on children’s education

Life is a whole lot less hectic for me this month compared to in December when I had a few rounds of shopping for the children’s back-to-school needs. That doesn’t mean less headache though… because now I need to look into the budget for the coming year.

There was an obvious increase in number of children covered either under our Education Sponsorship Program or our Children Education Fund (CEF).

The CEF started off many years ago just by passing round the hat to collect donations for a particular client whose children needed help with their schooling expenses. The committee than decided that a specific fund be set up so that in the event there were similar needing cases, there is already available fund without having to do another round of collection. CEF was (and still is) to cover for basic schooling needs – uniforms/fees/workbooks, and maybe bus fares on a case-to-case basis. I had not joined Buddies yet when the CEF was initially set-up.

After I joined Buddies, the committee had fresh ideas. Some families may need more than just basic schooling needs. They may need monthly pocket money as well. So we came up with the Education Sponsorship for Children program, where we get individual sponsors for each individual child needing sponsorship.

For the past few years, the amount we’ve been spending for both CEF and Sponsorship has been increasing. With additional children under sponsorship, in 2014 we spent RM41K compared to RM33K the year before. Likewise for CEF, more children received assistance in 2014 resulting in a spending of over RM38K compared to just over RM16K the year before.

Wow! That means if we combine both CEF and Sponsorship,  last year we spent close to RM80K just on children’s education alone.

I guess that shows how much we stress on the importance of education for the infected and/or affected children of our clients.

For the moment, am not too worried about the children under the Sponsorship program because the respective sponsors would top up their pledged yearly sponsored amount. But for those depending on CEF, I guess we will need to come up with some fundraising activities to ensure that the yearly assistance we’ve been giving to the children can continue without interruption.

♬ Money, money, money ♬