Thirteen programmes. Every one started with someone asking.

A quiet, supervised room, someone who checks that the homework is done and understood, a meal, and a safe place to be until a parent or guardian is back. Attendance is taken every day and we follow up on absences.

We firmly believe that a strong foundation in early literacy builds vocabulary, self-expression and reading comprehension: the things that turn a child into a lifelong learner. A child who arrives at primary school with those skills arrives eager. So alongside homework support runs a reading club for Grades 4–7.

We are also building a digital component, which is why laptops and smartphones are permanently on our wishlist. Youth from child-headed households cannot participate in digital programming on a shared phone.

What it costs: R500 a month supports one child fully. R5 000 covers a term for ten.

Meals of Hope is a drop-in centre that serves cooked meals to learners after school. All the children come from challenged backgrounds: poverty, parents living with addiction, single-mother homes, and orphanhood. For many of them this is the only cooked meal of the day, and school holidays, when the school feeding scheme stops, are the hardest weeks of the year.

Alongside the meals we distribute food hampers and help families start vegetable gardens at home, so that the support does not end at our door.

The project has grown from one feeding day a week to three, on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and now serves 680 meals every week to children in Kagiso and nearby informal settlements.

What it costs: R150 feeds one child for a month. R250 puts a meal in front of 25 children today.

This evidence-based, group- and community-level health education programme helps young people understand how sexually transmitted infections including HIV are, and are not, transmitted, and how to stay safe from infection.

It also covers gender-based violence, healing from the past, identifying and leaving abusive relationships, peer pressure and unhealthy friendships, drugs, and teenage pregnancy.

Alongside the education runs the practical half: sanitary pads and other menstrual hygiene products for adolescent girls and young women, both in and out of school. Many girls are absent from school every month simply because they are on their period. A girl who cannot afford pads stays home, which over a school career is weeks of lost class time, and it is the cheapest thing on this page to fix.

What it costs: R80 keeps one girl supplied for a month. R2 500 runs a full workshop for 30.

We train adults who already have standing in the community: teachers, women’s group leaders, church and community leaders. They learn to deliver life-orientation and health content confidently, and to recognise the signs that a child is in trouble.

One trained teacher reaches roughly 40 children a year, every year, without us present. It is the cheapest reach we have.

An evidence-based programme of about 12 sessions. It covers how to build a CV a potential employer actually notices, and how to write a clear, succinct motivational letter.

A large part of it is live mock interviews against a pre-designed set of genuinely tough questions: practice for the interview that decides everything.

The final sessions are about being a valuable employee: treating the opportunity with respect, and managing ethics, time management, interpersonal communication and teamwork in a new job.

This programme is about getting youth and women into the mainstream economy, starting with believing in themselves enough to change behaviour and personal choices.

It then builds financial capability through financial literacy education combined with actually starting to save, either in a group or individually. Saving is the habit that outlasts the training.

Together with the entrepreneurship and employability programmes, this forms a combination of financial literacy, employability, vocational, entrepreneurship, development finance and enterprise development skills training.