Shifting the power

Chance for Childhood has been working for more than thirty years to ensure a world where every child can go to school, learn and thrive. To make this future a reality, the solutions must come from the communities that we work with.

For too long, international development organisations have worked in ways that do not put power in the hands of the people that are being served. At Chance for Childhood, we have been implementing a strategy on shifting the power for the last five years, decentralising power from the UK towards the countries we work in (Ghana, Kenya, the DRC, Rwanda and Uganda).

Redistributing resources and putting decision-making closer to our countries of operation makes us more efficient, impactful, and reflects our values.

Achievements so far

Hiring an Africa-based CEO

In March 2025, our UK-based CEO took the intentional decision to step down to allow an African CEO to come in. In September 2025, following a recruitment process, our previous COO Ven Nyamondo stepped up to the CEO role. Ven is based in Kigali, Rwanda.

This was not a simple handover of power – it is part of fostering a new way of working to redress imbalances of power that are so common in the international development sector.

Read the joint blog from outgoing CEO Anna-mai Andrews and Ven Nyamondo here.

Majority African management

The majority of our senior management team are Africans currently living in African countries. Our global board of trustees is 50% African.

Enhancing country offices

Our headquarters are in the UK but we have shifted our model of working to make country offices the centres of service delivery with Country Representatives.

All programmes are run by nationals living and working in the countries of operation, and they make up the majority of our staff.

Increasing national decision-making

We brought our country representatives into the senior management team to drive more locally led decision-making, and transferred ownership of budgets to them in 2024 to give them greater autonomy and control.

Chance for Childhood Ghana also has its own Board, ensuring even more independence in the country.

#OverExposed

In 2022, we launched #OverExposed, a campaign to reframe thinking in the development sector around ethical storytelling and imagery. We are re-launching the campaign in 2025 to continue building a movement for change.

As part of the campaign, we stopped using children’s faces in all of our communications, including fundraising materials, because we don’t believe that a child can consent to their image being used online.

22 organisations in the development sector joined us by signing our pledge to reframe their thinking around using children’s stories.

Support the campaign:

Join the movement

Locally led development

The Big Pig project

In Rwanda, we knew that we wanted to design a project to boost the incomes of families of children with disabilities, as families often struggle to meet the additional costs associated with having a child with a disability.

The communities that we work with told us that pig farming would be an ideal way to generate income. By providing them with pregnant pigs, they could sell the piglets to other families in the area, and create a sustainable income for the future.

In 2025, the Big Pig project was born and is now running in three districts in Rwanda, supporting 470 families.

Girls United

Parents have been key to the success of our Girls United project in Namuwongo, an informal settlement in Kampala, Uganda. The project gives young girls brighter futures: football lessons teach them teamwork and boost fitness, while offering friendship and supporting wellbeing. Through learning sessions on reproductive rights, we support the girls to stay in school and avoid early pregnancies.

The project has been improved and expanded by embedding ideas from the girls’ parents, such as parent-support groups and community watch committees for child protection, and parent-led savings and support groups to help with costs such as uniforms and school materials.

Parent-led initiatives

In Rwanda, we saw that a low percentage of children with disabilities were getting the support they needed even after diagnosis because they lived too far away from healthcare or physiotherapy centres. At the request of parents, we introduced local rehab sites closer to families, and introduced home visits from physiotherapists to teach parents basic rehab skills so they can support their children in the long-term.

The desire from parents to learn more about taking care of their children with disabilities then led us to set up week-long learning camps for parents to teach them skills to communicate and play with their children. Since then, some have also formed their own parent-support groups independently to help each other.