SpaceX donates 750 Starlink systems to childcare institutions in 16 countries, including Kenya
SpaceX is donating 750 Starlink satellite internet systems to residential childcare institutions in 16 countries, nine of them in Africa, in a grant to the US non-profit Both Ends Believing (BEB). The grant is valued at close to $1 million, and for many of the homes involved it will mean a dependable internet connection for the first time.
The African recipients are Botswana, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe. BEB will hand out the equipment through its in-country teams and its working relationships with national governments.
The aim goes beyond getting children online. The connection is meant to power Children First Software, BEB’s child welfare platform, which lets governments and care providers register children, move paper files into digital records and manage individual cases. Those tools are built to help speed up the return of children to their biological families, or their placement in permanent family care.
Each participating home will receive the Starlink hardware, shipping, installation support and 12 months of high-speed service at no charge. Once that year ends, the facilities can keep the service at a heavily discounted rate.
The grant also signals a shift for Starlink’s charitable work. Until now, the programme has mostly connected schools, hospitals and communities in underserved areas. Children’s homes are a new focus.
BEB says the problem it is tackling starts with visibility. “Every child deserves to be visible, protected, and connected to family and opportunity, and reliable internet access is often the missing piece. You cannot reunify a child you cannot find, and you cannot inspect a facility you do not know exists. Across Africa, governments are being asked to reform care systems they cannot yet fully see. We are deeply grateful to SpaceX for ensuring that geography and connectivity are no longer barriers to the future of some of the world’s most unseen and vulnerable children, giving them a pathway to family, education, opportunity, and hope,” said Bruce Graham, President of Both Ends Believing.
The scale of the issue is large. An estimated 5.4 million children worldwide live in institutions. Across Africa, governments are working to make institutional care a short-term measure of last resort, yet many still have no reliable figures on how many children live in such facilities, how they got there, or what routes exist to reunite them with relatives or find alternative family-based care.
The African Committee of Experts on the Rights and Welfare of the Child (ACERWC) put the number of African children without parental care at roughly 35 million in its 2023 Continental Study on Children Without Parental Care in Africa. The study also found that over 70% of African countries have no explicit, comprehensive policy framework to protect these children, and it urged that they be counted in national data systems.
Policy has moved in the same direction. Last year the ACERWC adopted General Comment No. 10 on Article 25 of the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child. It repeats that institutional care should be temporary and used only as a last resort, and it requires governments to register and monitor every institution that cares for children and to keep their records current.
For the people running the homes, the daily reality is more basic. “In many of our homes, a child’s information is still kept in paper files that are easily damaged or lost, and sometimes the most important details are missing: who the child is, where they came from, who referred them. When that happens, children become invisible to the very systems meant to protect them. Children First helps homes fix that, but only if they can get online. Starlink removes that barrier. It means records kept up to date, relatives who can be traced, and more children with the chance to grow up in safe, stable and permanent families,” said Sandra Chikan, Vice President, Northern Nigeria, at ASOHON.
Both Ends Believing works in more than 20 countries. It has helped governments and childcare providers digitise the records of tens of thousands of children, and its efforts have contributed to thousands of children leaving institutional care for family homes.
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