What do you think about the role of aid agencies? Surely there must have been some reason why Madonna felt so compelled to go to this extreme level of action to help a poor child. Do you think this is a challenge for aid agencies like World Vision?
I think it's a challenge for aid agencies and for governments. It just raises the issue again of the extreme poverty faced by many across the world and the extreme vulnerability of children.
According to reports, the orphanage Madonna chose her child from had 4,000 children. And we know that across Sub-Saharan Africa there are over 12 million children orphaned and in the next four or five years that is going to be raised to over 20 million. So it highlights the issue and highlighting the issue also highlights the challenges.
I think certainly it challenges governments to look at how they can better protect children and keep families together, how they can provide for children's education and healthcare and provide families with the livelihoods necessary to keep these families together.
It also challenges us as aid agencies in terms of how do we respond to this, what do we do. And World Vision's response is very much community based. It's looking at how we can support communities to care for children within them.
How will you be advising individuals, perhaps individuals who come to you for advice, who desperately want to help a child in poverty but who feel that normal measures are not enough?
Our guiding principle is the best interests of the child and we believe in most circumstances that the best interest of the child is keeping the child within their family and community environment.
World Vision offers child sponsorship whereby a person can sponsor a child within a community and give an amount each month toward that community and fund education and healthcare and sanitation and clean water within that community so that the child is able to grow up in a healthy environment and is able to stay with their parents. And we'll fund parents within those communities through loans to actually make a living themselves so that they can look after their children themselves and not have to put their children in orphanages or foster or adopt them out.
And you think that is the route that Madonna should have gone down? You think she should have helped the wider community?
Definitely, that would be what we believe. And we don't know whether she did look at these alternative means of helping but it would seem from what we have read that this would have been a good alternative, probably a better alternative for the child.
