OUR 40th Anniversary - Healing Kids: The National Project

Phase I Capacity Development & Resource Mobilization

Public hospitals care for 80% of South Africa's population today. Yet, in comparison to private health care facilities, these hospitals are poorly resourced and their services completely overburdened. The situation is exacerbated by government's longstanding inability to provide all the required equipment, facilities, staff, etc in order to ensure high quality service delivery. Paediatric patients are some of the most vulnerable patient audiences anywhere in the world. Mobilizing the necessary resources to provide proper, high quality services to them is indeed our obligation as a nation. Phase I of Healing Kids initiated a pilot project in 4 vastly different settings, with a view to facilitating innovative ways of mobilizing resources for its beneficiaries.

Each of the 4 beneficiaries was funded at the level of R1.5 million. Initially, the successful applicants were actively involved during an orientation process and a set-up phase, followed by the submission of resource mobilization strategies to the Foundation and upon approval thereof, formal grant agreements were entered into. Their progress was closely monitored by the Foundation, amongst others through the submission of written reports, conducting on-site evaluations and convening peer learning & sharing forums. In addition thereto, they were also supported by means of technical assistance.

Each beneficiary's fundraising efforts were geared at using the Fuchs Foundation grant to build their infrastructure, capacity, systems and skills in order to raise economic benefit in four categories, including:

•	cash received
•	donations-in-kind (mostly expensive medical equipment)
•	cost savings (expenses that would ordinarily have been incurred by the hospital, which they have managed to reduce – sometimes, to zero)
•	government contributions to the beneficiary's fundraising goals.

The Foundation invested R7.5 million directly in the 4 beneficiaries over a period of 3 years. Their collective value creation target for the corresponding period, as determined by the beneficiaries themselves, was an optimistic R43 million in total.

Here, the four beneficiaries were:

WITS Paediatric Fund
The Wits Paediatric... Universitas Hospital – Beds of Hope Campaign
The Beds of... The Boikanyo Foundation
The Boikanyo Foundation... Groote Schuur Hospital Neonatal Newborn Trust
The Groote Schuur...