Welcome to Yabonga

Yabonga teaches and supports children, women and men as partners how to live positively in the context of poverty and HIV/Aids.

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About us

Empowering Children and Mothers living with HIV

welcome Yabonga was founded in 1998 and initially provided support for educare centres that were operating informally in squatter settlements. Later these backyard educare centres were provided with containers that had been converted to create more permanent and secure facilities.

In 2001 Yabonga built the Fikelela Children's Centre for HIV orphans in Khayelitsha.The operational management was subsequently handed to the Anglican Church.

Yabonga has since focused on providing support for HIV-infected mothers and their children. In 2001 a pilot project was initiated with the aim of training infected mothers in HIV education, self-growth and income generation. The expectation was that the trainees would benefit on a personal level, and also serve as peer group educators in their home communities.

The pilot project was converted into a 4-month training programme and thus far 200 women have graduated as peer educators. Ten HIV/Aids support centres have been established in the communities and 120 women are employed in these centres as peer educators.

Our Mission

The mission of Yabonga is to create an effective, sustainable model of care that provides education, support and skills development in order to empower HIV positive women and men to effect positive change in the lives of their children, families and in the communities where they live, based on the principles of positive living, personal development and income generation.

Yabonga trains women and men who are living with HIV with skills to enable them to become educators and lay counsellors at Yabonga Support Centres, which are based at clinics in communities where they live.

What makes the Yabonga programme unique in its service delivery is that all educators and lay counsellors are HIV positive themselves and therefore are able to convey first hand information to their clients. This is especially useful during counselling sessions. As many of our educators are also on anti-retroviral treatment (ARV’s), they are able to assist clients with issues around adherence and dealing with side effects.

Yabonga is currently active within 12 centres and employ more than 100 previously unemployed HIV positive women and men - we would like to expand our HIV/AIDS project to serve additional communities and train and employ more staff where there is a demand and need for our programme. We would like to embark on an ambitious expansion programme reinforcing our objectives of education and skills development in impoverished communities, so that they are empowered to help themselves and play a constructive role in society.

Apart form the HIV/AIDS Programme for adults, Yabonga also runs an Orphans and Vulnerable Children’s Programme and Community Mother Programme as well as a Youth Programme.

Our Orphans and Vulnerable Children Programme currently supports over 500 school-going children aged between 5 and 12 years. These children are impoverished and made vulnerable as they have either lost parents or guardians to AIDS, or are living with parents who are HIV positive. A high number of children are infected with the virus themselves. Yabonga provides psycho-social support in form of support groups and individual counselling, annual school packs including uniforms and stationery, holiday programme like camps and outings as well as educational assistance. The children’s nutritional needs are taken care of by Community Mothers who cook and care for the children in their own homes, creating an additional place of safety for them.

The Youth Programme aims to develop and empower disadvantaged and vulnerable Youth in a holistic manner to make a positive impact on various aspects of their lives. The Programme currently caters for about 300 high school learners in six different Townships around Cape Town.

History of Yabonga

ursel_and_ulpha Yabonga was founded in 1998 by Ulpha Robertson and Ursel Barnes – both mothers with an interest in education, and concerned about the lack of quality school readiness programmes in impoverished communities. Yabonga’s aim was to better prepare children for mainstream schooling. Within two years, and after establishing seven educare centres, Yabonga came across its first HIV positive child. The life of this child and his mother led Yabonga to a programme focusing on positive mothers.

Today Yabonga's support programmes have benefited more than 800,000 people and Yabonga employs more than 100 people to run the extensive support network for HIV/Aids from Support Centres in 12 impoverished areas around Cape Town.