Establishing the Kindu Trust

When Kate Fereday Eshete met Kindu, a young orphan boy, on the streets in the northern Ethiopian town of Gondar, she was determined to help him, and others like him.  It was Valentine’s Day, 1998, when Kate came upon the filthy, ragged and hungry Kindu.  He spent his days searching for scraps of food in hotel dustbins and was a tiny, skinny boy who lived from hand to mouth.
 
Kate fed Kindu and his young friends from the street.  Some were only 3 years old.  Within a month, in March 1998, Kate had founded the Kindu Trust in the UK, naming the new charity after seven-year-old Kindu, recognising it was her meeting with him that had inspired her to take action. 

The charity successfully set up residential care for 80 vulnerable children, employing 43 full and part-time staff to care for them.  While the programme provided excellent support for these children, it became evident that the best support was for children to be brought up in families, wherever possible.  


Kate, Kindu’s founder, with one of the beneficiaries

So, the children's homes were closed and the children reintegrated into society. They were reunited with relatives or placed with foster families, and they received continuing guidance and financial support through the well-established Kindu Trust Child Sponsorship Scheme.

The Kindu Trust found it was able to support a greater number of children. A Trust house would typically provide residential care for about ten children, yet for the annual cost of running a children's home, a total of fifty young people in the community could be supported through our Sponsorship Scheme for a year.

The 'Family Reunion Programme' was a great success.  Kate and her staff found the children's relatives, met and talked to them about reunion, counselled the children who were to be reunited, arranged for the children to move to their new homes, and later carried out follow-up visits to ensure all was well.  Over the years since then the Trust has continued to thrive, helping more children and families than ever before.

Find out more about the Trust’s current work.