Our child sponsorship program is the primary focus and function of Miqlat in Malawi. The Hope Centers were founded on the desire to respond to the Gospel call to meet Jesus among the poor and do whatever was needed to keep at-risk children alive. Miqlat staff work with community leaders to evaluate the needs of each village in our area and identify the most vulnerable children. These young people are connected to a sponsor in the United States who, through a donation of $46 per month, provide for their basic needs with abundant love and expand their access to opportunity.

In the years since Kogoya Hope Center opened its doors in 2006, we have added a second Hope Center at Thuchila and transitioned from working exhaustively to give our children the basic tools to survive to striving creatively to offer our children the opportunity to flourish and thrive. There are five foundational pillars that create the support structure for our growing leaders: optimal nutrition, access to quality health care, the provision of high quality education, life-giving spiritual discipleship and sustainable agricultural training.

While many expect that the best way to help vulnerable children is to build orphanages to house them, at Miqlat we have seen the strong communal heart of Malawi and believe that God can use us best by serving the children in the homes where they stay with their aunts, grandmothers, or other relatives. They join us at the Hope Centers in the afternoons, finding us a safe space of care and recreation in their day. In this way, we hope to integrate with the community rather than remove the children from it and we believe that what is received at the Hope Centers makes its way back home to brothers, sisters, and neighbors. 

Our sponsored children attend school each day and then converge on the Hope Centers for a hefty and nutritionally balanced meal. After lunch, an afternoon program begins featuring discipleship class, board games, organized sports, creative activities such as knitting and crocheting, or singing and prayer. The key element of this time period is that there are loving and engaged adults participating with our children in all of these activities, showing them that they are worth listening to, worth playing with, and worth caring for.

Through sponsorship, our children have their physical and tangible needs met on the one hand and their less obvious but monumentally important spiritual, mental, and emotional needs met on the other. 

In addition to our child sponsorship program, Miqlat works with the community to increase the overall wellness of our villages. We have drilled many safe water wells, offered free clinic days, repaired houses after difficult rainy seasons, hosted pastor’s conferences and community prayer days, offered Foundations for Farming trainings and competitions, and started an HPV screening and prevention program.

Working hand in hand with village chiefs and other community leaders, we stay informed about unusual challenges around the area and offer our support as we are able.

Currently, we are developing a project to come alongside our older girl students who, due to a lack of sanitary protection during their monthly cycle, regularly miss a few days of school out of every month. An affordable and washable sanitary pad has been created to address this widespread problem and we hope to partner with the organization that makes them to meet the needs of our own girls. 

We are also looking to expand our technological education at the Hope Centers. Thuchila now houses a 5 station computer lab where our young people are learning basic computing and supplementing their studies in secondary school. We hope to build a similar center at Kogoya as funding allows. 

The average student to teacher ratio in Malawi public elementary schools is 88:1. Even a well-paid, well-trained, well-resourced teacher would likely struggle to attend to each student in this high density environment. Unfortunately, the schools in the rural districts where we serve also fight to acquire qualified teachers, learning materials, and even suitable classroom buildings. Unicef estimates that the elementary school system currently functions with a shortage of 30,000 classrooms.

Though the situation has been improving slowly throughout the last decade, God has put a vision of high quality education for our children in the hearts of the Miqlat team. In 2016, He provided the initial funding and we enthusiastically embarked on our long anticipated school project - to create primary schools for grades 1–8 at each Hope Center.

In September of 2016, in fulfillment of the initial part of the vision, the Miqlat Primary School at Kogoya opened its doors. In September of 2017, Thuchila Primary School launched into action.

Each year from now until the completion of the schools, we plan to build two new classrooms at each Hope Center, bringing on new teachers, new staff, and new students as each subsequent building materializes. Though we currently teach only our sponsored children, we hope that the future of Miqlat schools will involve children from the community as well.  

Our schools are marked by the same love and principles as the rest of the Miqlat organization and our teachers are treated as part of the Hope Center field staff family. Selected from recent teaching college graduates, Miqlat teachers have been tackling the challenge of instructing students with vastly varying prior learning inside one classrooms while experimenting with new teaching techniques and learning fresh perspectives on child development. Though we are still facing the traditional village challenge of guardians who ask children to stay home from school to do chores, the Miqlat Mission School has been met with an enthusiastic response from our students who are eager for any knowledge or interaction we are able to offer them.